Principled Uncertainty

Every Thanksgiving, or at least for two years running, it has been the practice of the New York Times editorial page to print an appropriately grateful editorial. “Hard-hitting” would not, perhaps, be the most accurate descriptor for these pieces: Last year’s, for instance, emphasized the necessity for solidarity in tough times. This year’s waxed no less optimistic. “It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring,” it declaimed. “Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning.”

On the morning of the 26th, that Panglossian prose initially confronted this writer as merely irritating. All joyful anticipation of the evening’s potatoes-and-pie promised land had just buckled under the triple knockout blows of a flat tire, a Weather Channel-defying drizzle, and a carnivorous version of Microsoft Office (one that apparently thrives on devouring junior papers-in-progress without a trace). No curmudgeon by nature, I couldn’t help but note that the “unexpected” seemed to get its kicks in somewhat perverse ways. In the end, however, holiday cheer prevailed, prompting a reluctant revaluation: Surely there must be some recent, unanticipated events that merit thanks?

As it so happens, the news was full of them. To start with, the watercooler gossip of the week: the couple who crashed a White House dinner party, posing for photos with political bigwigs like Obama and Biden and posting them to their Facebook. Turns out these were no high-society fundraisers but—surprise!—just a flashily dressed, celebrity-obsessed couple from Virginia, who also happened to be auditioning for “The Real Housewives of D.C.” The subsequent Secret Service foot-shuffling occasioned much media meditation on the shortfalls of government security. More thankfully, the story finally traced in bold the parallels between the equally absurd worlds of reality television and politics. Pursuing those connections wouldn’t be such a bad thing, maybe: Michelle always did seem like she could give Tyra a run for her fashion.

If this seems trivial, there’s no doubt that we should be grateful for the unpredicted survival of Nabokov’s incomplete final novel “The Original of Laura,” finally published a few weeks ago. Despite Nabokov’s request that it be posthumously burnt, his family suddenly concluded a tortured 30-year debate this fall by deciding to grant the public access to the fragments. Reviewers rightly note that the book falls far short of being a “Pale Fire” or “Lolita”—but we’re still lucky to have recourse to those passages which, in all their flawed beauty, throw light on his best.

In “Pnin,” Nabokov once wrote that “the order of the solar spectrum is not a closed circle but a spiral of tints from cadmium red and oranges through a strontian yellow and a pale paradisal green to cobalt blues and violets.” He would have been delighted by the chance findings of an Oregon State grad student this week, who in the process of experimenting with manganese oxide in a 2,000-degree furnace accidentally created a never-before-seen pigment of blue. Reportedly “shocked” at first, the professor in charge of the lab has confirmed that the crystal structure of the brilliant new color is stable, generating much excitement among chemists.

It would be easy to continue in this way, pulling at random from the grab bag of unpredictable news stories with happy endings. An attempt to Wikipedia “uncertainty principle” yields far too many Greek symbols for any still carbohydrate-glutted comprehension (although the page does include a pretty funny Heisenberg joke). I’m confident, though, that the Times is right—that it’s just these spontaneous, surprising events for which we should be most appreciative. Chance can admittedly pack a painful punch: Didn’t all those foreclosed mortgages take us unawares too? Yet the hopeful thought that, even in the worst of times, tomorrow things might look up fundamentally relies on the notions of uncertainty and the pleasantly unexpected. We can at least be sure of that.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.