On the unexpected

It took me a while to locate the passage that lodged in my memory in high school, as I never reread the book and did not retain a copy marked with sticky notes as the books I read in graduate school were.  Credit for pointing out the passage does not go to the teacher but to another student who mentioned the soundness of the observation outside the context of class.  At the beginning of chapter 5 in Silas Marner,  the narrator observes:

This is the edition we read.

His legs were weary, but his mind was at ease, free from the presentiment of change. The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. 

This is really the essence of the argument Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes in The Black Swan, a good century plus after Silas Marner was published. Modern audiences may find it easier to read  Taleb's book  George Eliot's novel, which is characterized by a rather dense style of prose. While Taleb appears to be well-read, he doesn't refer to English literature, as he does to French works, so it is quite probable that he has never read the novels of George Eliot. Still in those few lines, she distills a lot of his argument: People form their expectations, believing that if something that is unprecedented is not to be anticipated. If one breaks out of the limits of what one has seen and experienced, then they may entertain more possibilities, resulting in what Taleb suggests could be a "grey swan," an event that is not what you would expect but that does not take  you altogether by surprise.

Related post: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/02/representing-randomness.html  

Representing Randomness

 Two views of the same thing: what is it?
I posed the question to a couple of people who answered confidently that it represented something lost at sea, a shipwreck or treasure. They took their contextual clues from the sea scene set around the object and the appearance of being caught in a net.

In fact, what the pictures represent is what I put together during a visit to the Queens Museum. I followed the directions to "make a mess."  The idea was to gather up various items from the bins and attach them to a base without a set plan about the structure.  I have no problem with randomness. The reason I opted for the sea picture was really because it looked better than the gray cardboard, and it happened to be right near my place at the table.

Is this art? I would say not, except in the sense that it is quite as "useless" as Oscar Wilde declares art to be. But what this nonrepresentational product does represent is how the viewer frames it to give it contextual meaning.   That we impose narrative on randomness to make sense of and remember events is one of the concepts that Nassim Nicholas Taleb brings up in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

An observation on this state of human nature was made a long time ago by Marian Evans, when she wrote Middlemarch,  the novel considered her masterpiece. In chapter 27, she throws in this observation:

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person...