by John Crowley
What occupied my thoughts in those somnolent days were certain metaphysical or logical propositions that had been argued or at least passed around a great deal in the time of my youth. I was considering the million monkeys of Émile Borel, as described in his 1913 essay La mécanique statique et l’irréversibilité. J. Phys. Theor. Appl., 1913, 3 (1), pp.189-196. As is well known, Borel posited that a million monkeys randomly hitting a typewriter keyboard for ten hours a day will in time almost surely type all the words in all the books of the Bibliothèque nationale in many combinations, including the order in which they actually occur in those million volumes. In the restatement of the theorem most popular among English speakers, the monkeys eventually type out the collected works of William Shakespeare. The crux of the argument, as enunciated by Borel and those who took up his proposition, was that the term almost surely has a precise definition in the language of the mathematics of probability, a definition rather unlike the one we use: Almost surely my mother loves me above her other children; almost surely my ancestor was a hero in the battle in which he died. These statements differ from Borel’s.
In later years the million monkeys of M. Borel were replaced in the theory by an infinite number of monkeys, or by a single monkey typing all the time forever. In the latter formulation, all of Shakespeare must eventually be produced; in the former, all of Shakespeare (and every other written work) is produced instantaneously as soon as the typing begins. Neither of these refinements seemed to me to be as worth pondering as M. Borel’s million monkeys who could only almost surely produce the soliloquies of Hamlet, the madness of Lear, and the love of Antony and Cleopatra—who indeed could almost surely produce them even if Shakespeare had never written them, and likewise all other books both already written and never written before.
At this juncture, a visitor arrived with a piece of machinery he had brought to see if it could assist me in the dilemmas both banal and esoteric which a loss of eyesight entails. He had come to be devoted to certain works of mine, published in obscure journals long ago but apparently ubiquitous now. The machine was a computer of a kind not yet available to the general public, which he could set up in such a way as to cause it to read aloud whatever text it was given, or which it was directed to ask for from its memory. My young friend assured me that the memory of the computer—no bigger than a lady’s vanity case—contained the entire works of several of my beloved authors, as well as Shakespeare, the Bible in several languages, and other works of science and philosophy. If manipulated in the right way it could also reach into libraries around the world, where other bodies of miniaturized and encoded texts were kept.
My wonder at this was somewhat dampened when, after working an afternoon, he directed the machine to read a text I had selected (a story of Chesterton’s). The voice proceeding from the machine was neither the voice that the story had spoken in when my eyes had used to pass over it, nor the voice of a human reader sitting beside me. It was the voice that the dead gods of Egypt might have spoken in when summoned by Agrippa or Trithemius: a corpse’s voice. My shock and grief (for I had greatly anticipated the riches awaiting me) at this inhuman parroting of human words saddened my friend, and not wishing to seem to spurn his good intentions toward me, I began to question him about the machine and its powers.
“There are puzzles in metaphysics,” he said, “and thought experiments in physics, that can now be carried out in actual fact. The long-standing problem of how few colors a mapmaker would need to construct a map where no two contiguous countries or regions would be the same color, no matter what the shape of the regions: a computer (more powerful by far than this one) has proven that three colors are in fact enough, which before there was no way to demonstrate. The only drawback is that the proof resides in the computer, and is so complex that only another computer as powerful as the first can certify it.
“And there is the problem of the million monkeys who sit down to type all the works of Shakespeare,” he continued, astonishing me with the workings of Coincidence, whose laws might also be known only to computers, and provable only by other computers. He said that computers were easily able to produce random series of letters according to any rule the maker imposed. Suppose for instance a rule was set that the computer should generate a text exactly as long as the First Folio of Shakespeare, all letters, punctuation and spaces being counted. In a matter of seconds the computer could generate a text wherein, as in the Cabala of Abulafia, the letters of the Shakespeare text were replaced en bloc by others produced at random. It could be shown that if the computer were to produce these false folios at the rate of one per second, it was estimated that the universe would end, the suns burn out, and all would be reduced to aimless atoms and cold, before so much as a single play, perhaps a single entire line, was produced in its proper place.
One rule, however, would hasten the process. (He called it an algorithm, a word of the Arab arithmeticians who in their texts had liked to write out their endless equations in words made of letters, and not in the number forms they had themselves invented.) The computer could easily, in its comparisons, determine if so much as a single letter of any false text fell by chance where the same letter fell in the Folio text. Preserving that letter in its position, the computer would examine the next, and the next, discarding everything in each one except the letters—it might be two, or ten, or none—that fell where the same letters fell in the text.
“If that little rule is followed,” said my young friend—eager and smiling, it was hard not to see him as the herald of a triumphant army, come joyfully to demand the instant surrender of an ancient town—“then the entire works of Shakespeare can be re-created in a very short time. All that’s needed is for the computer to save the accumulated coincidences of all the false texts with the real text.”
All that was needed, then, was for the text to exist in advance of the attempt to produce it. It was, as he said, a simple matter. Yet it would never satisfy those who contemplate, in the shadows of ancient libraries, the million monkeys of M. Borel. For the secret longing of those dreamers is not for the books of ours they might reproduce, but for those texts of their own, unknown to us, unknown even to themselves, that they might create. The great computer my young friend contemplated, examining the texts that its blind mechanical monkeys produced at inconceivable speed, retaining only what they shared with an Elizabethan whose works we know by heart—what other works, unknown to us, works we have needed and sought for and dreamed of existing, would it, every day, every instant, discard forever?
When the young engineer had gone—somewhat downcast, it seemed to me, yet promising to return to give me further instruction—I placed my hand upon the box he had brought; as silent now as the statue from which the god has departed. The fact that it—unlike those fatuous and impossible monkeys—actually could generate such things could break the hearts of those who, in another day, were able to smile at the thought of an endless library composed of all possible combinations of all the letters that we know. “We think, when we read, that we hear the voice of a person; but if we question it, it will not reply.”
This Is Our Town
When I was young I lived in a place called Timber Town. It can be found in a book called This Is Our Town, which is part of the “Faith and Freedom” series of readers, and was written by Sister Mary Marguerite, S.N.D (which stands for Seours de Notre-Dame), and published by Ginn and Company, copyright 1953. Catholic children read it in the fourth and fifth grades.
Timber Town was a small river town, where exactly the book never said, but it would have to be somewhere in the Northeast, maybe in Pennsylvania. Upriver from Timber Town was a place called Coalsburg, which was where the trains from the mines came down to load their coal onto barges. Downriver from Timber Town was a city of mills called Twin City, because a part of the city was on one side of the river and another, poorer part was on the other side. These names were easy to remember and understand, even for young child
ren. River ferries and trains ran from town to town and farther, down somewhere to the sea, I suppose. In the double title page you can see us kids high on a hillside, looking over the river valley and the mills and the church; we wear the saddle shoes and the striped shirts and flaring flowered skirts we did wear then, and in the pale sky are pillowy clouds and the black check-marks of flying birds. I can still feel the wind.
The book tells stories of then and now, of the flood that hurt so many houses in Timber Town and nearly washed away Coalsburg: I saw all that, I was there. The book has stories of long-before, when miracles happened to children like us in other lands, and stories of saints like St. John Bosco, the saint after whom our school was named. But most of the stories are about our town, and the nuns in our school, and the priests in the church, and the feast days and holidays of the months one after another. The stories are all true and of course they happened to us or we caused them to happen, or they wouldn’t be in the book; but the book never told everything about us, nor all that we could do and did.
May, 1953:
It has been a long time now since I last saw my guardian angel. Of course I know she’s here with me all the time whether I can see her or not, and I can hear myself tell myself the words she would once say to me to guide me and keep me from harm, but I haven’t seen her as herself, the way I guess all kids can.
I remember how she stood behind me at my First Communion, her hand on my shoulder, and how it was the same for all of us in white kneeling at the rail as the priest came closer to us, going from one to the next. We never talked about when or how we saw our guardian angels, but we all knew. My brother Thad walked along beside the priest, in his cassock, with his hand on his breast, carrying the little tray on a stick (the paten, he told me it’s called) to hold under our chins as Father Paine placed the Host on our tongues, in case some tiny fragment of the Body of Christ fell off and to the purple rug: because every fragment of the Host is God, at least for a while. Perhaps because it was the first time, we didn’t feel—at least I didn’t—the wondrous warmth and sweetness, the dark power too, that comes with swallowing God. It would come gradually, and we would long for it.
After Mass was done we all went out into the sun and the trees in flower and marched—or went in procession anyway—around the church to the white statue of Mary, crowned the previous Sunday with pink roses that had shed petals all around the statue’s base. I never much liked this statue, white as the plaster casts in the library, her eyes unable to see. And there we sang.
My white dress and my little white missal and my white kid gloves were all put away and I was sitting on the back steps wearing dungarees, my feet bare, and she said (my guardian angel) that a sad thing about being an angel is that you can never partake of Communion like living people can. Angels know that it is a wonderful thing and they can know what their person feels, because they know their person and they know God. But they can never have it themselves.
I asked: Does that make an angel sad?
Well, my angel said, nothing really makes an angel sad.
And then she clutched her knee in her linked hands, just the way you do when you’re sitting with crossed legs, and said There are angels for other things than people. Every animal in the world has a kind of angel, a little one or a big one, who’s born with the animal and vanishes away when the animal dies.
Will you vanish away? I asked, but she laughed the way she does and said I am yours forever and will always be with you.
She doesn’t have wings, and a long time ago when we were younger I asked her why. I don’t need wings to come and go, she said. The pictures only show us with wings because that’s the only way people can think of us, able to ascend and descend, bring messages, see to the whole wide world. But big feathery wings or little wings stuck to their backs—who could ever fly with those?
I thought about that and about how birds’ wings are their arms, really.
Does Cousin Winnie have a guardian angel? I asked. Cousin Winnie wasn’t a Catholic and didn’t say prayers or go to any church.
Of course he does.
What is Cousin Winnie’s guardian angel like?
Just like me. But older and . . . quieter. Actually I don’t know what he’s really like.
He can’t see his guardian angel, I said. Can he?
Well, you know what? my angel said. Grown-ups can’t, mostly. Can’t see or hear them.
They can’t?
Not mostly.
I thought then that that was the saddest thing I had ever learned. And now I know it’s so.
June:
My mother wasn’t born a Catholic. She went to many different churches, she said, and in school she learned to play the organ, and sometimes played in the churches her family went to. They moved a lot from town to town until she came to Timber Town and met Dad. Sometimes I think she was the only person in Timber Town who wasn’t Catholic; but when she married Dad of course she had to become a Catholic, and she did, and she was glad about everything we did and the holidays and the feast days coming like chapters in their turn. But the one thing she went on loving were the hymns and the music in the churches she’d grown up in. And because she sang them in her soft voice as she worked or cooked, we learned them too; at least I did. She sang Abide with me, fast falls the eventide and she sang Jesu, joy of man’s desiring and Praise God from whom all blessings flow and I sat in silence and listened, and the words and the music entered my heart and still remain there.
She had a way of talking about things like saints and hymns and Bible quotes that made it seem she thought they were not serious or important to her, that they were like funny old poems or Bing Crosby songs, but I think that was because she actually loved them and wanted to protect them. She called the Thursday of Holy Week Maundy Thursday (we pretended she’d said Monday Thursday, and laughed every time, every year), and she knew of saints we hadn’t heard of. Like St. Swithin. If it rains on St. Swithin’s Day in June, she said, it will rain for forty days; and if the sun shines it will shine for forty days. He was also the patron saint of apples. She would sing:
High in the Heavenly Places
I see Saint Swithin stand.
His garments smell of apples
And rain-wet English land.
Mom’s cousin Winnie came to stay with us now and then—when he had to rest, she said. We were told to call him Cousin Winnie as she did, even though he was older than Mom and I don’t know whose cousin he really was. I also didn’t know what he did in the world or what he had to rest from, but I do now. He would arrive weak and thin and shaking and be put into the little room at the top of the house and my mother would take care of him, though I was never sure she really liked him that much. He was a dim sort of person, at least when he was resting. When he got stronger he would help around the house. One thing he was good at was card tricks. He told us the Devil had taught him, and that’s why we could never see through his tricks, but I don’t think he believed in the Devil any more than he believed in God.
When he came to rest in our house for the last time he did none of those things. He didn’t get up at all. When I brought him coffee in the morning it seemed he had been crying. He was gray-white like the worn old sheets he lay on.
I told Mom he was dying. I was sure of it, and my guardian angel was sure of it too. And I said she should call Father Michaels to come. Father Michaels is the Parochial Vicar and helps Father Paine. Cousin Winnie’s not a Catholic, she said. But I knew what I knew and I just looked at her and looked at her until she went to the telephone.
Father Michaels came and talked with him a long time with the door of the little room shut. We waited in our rooms or in the kitchen and didn’t make a sound. Cousin Winnie died a little while later.
I asked Mom: Did Father Michaels win his soul?
Well, I don’t know, my mother said. Winnie said a prayer at the end. And crossed
himself. So I don’t know.
Did he make a good Act of Contrition? I asked, because no sin can be forgiven without that.
Well, my mother said. He had a lot of sins to recount, and I doubt he got to all of them.
Then he would only go to Purgatory.
Uh-huh, my mother said, and even though she was crying she was laughing too. You bet. For a good long time too.
July:
In the book This Is Our Town there are more chapters about the great flood than about anything else. It nearly washed away my house and other houses, and did wash away houses of miners and other people in Coalsburg; their houses came down the river in parts and pieces, roofs and fences and once a doghouse with a little goat riding on top of it. My brother Thad went out with his friends in the fireman’s rescue boat and rescued the goat. Along Second Street, which runs along the river, the water reached the windows of the first floors and kept rising. The gas and electricity stopped and we lived by lamps and candles and ate from cans. There is a chapter about how Mr. Popkin refused to take his ferry out for fear it would be swamped and lost. There is a chapter about how Father Michaels went up the river with an old man in a little motorboat to bring the Blessed Sacrament to the man’s friend, who was dying. It’s very dangerous, the man warns Father Michaels. We will not think about danger, Father Michaels replies. My life would be worth nothing if I am afraid to save others for Christ.
And then the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, our church, began to sag to one side as the earth and stones were washed away along the bank where it stood. It was decided that the school children should be taken to Twin City and stay in shelters made in the big school and the parish hall, sleep on cots, and go to Mass in the huge dark church there. We were among strangers.