Some Trick

by Helen DeWitt

There were all these conservative colours that you don’t see any more, this navy blue, navy blue is the hardest colour to match so it dates really obviously because the idea people have in their head of a dark neutral blue changes over the years, people in the fashion industry, the way they perceive a dark blue is affected by the other colours they are working with at the time. So there was this navy blue that had survived like a finch in the Galapagos, and a prehistoric brown, and some greys that also date really quickly. They were not utilitarian colours, just colours of cloth that was meant to end up in respectable clothes and you would not imagine the body inside and you would not imagine that people would sign a form to put people on a train to go off and be butchered.

author’s note: Many years ago a friend commented that we rarely see fiction that shows the way mathematicians think. He talked about the styles of play in poker of a mathematician, an economist and a philosopher. The thing that struck me as especially interesting was the different ways of thinking about probability; I was a great admirer of Edward Tufte’s work on information design, and I thought this might be used in some way to make non-intuitive ways of thinking about probability visible on the page. I began reading obsessively about statistics and probability. Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk was one inspiration; he says: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature.” Analysis of probability seemed more compelling than ever for fiction; I spent endless hours grappling with R, a programming language with strength in statistical graphics. R is open source, and it has come a long way since I first downloaded the DMG. What hasn’t changed, I think, is the gap between people who see why understanding chance matters and people who just don’t get it—people who don’t see why this is crucial to the most basic questions of ethics. I have more glamorous plots in my portfolio than the primitive efforts on display in this story, but the philosophical issue was what I hoped to bri...

There’s a story by John Crowley that uses probability as a stylistic tool. Was it in Engine Summer? Little, Big? I can’t tell you.

Having written so much it seems we must continue: language squeezes an author like an orange. X and I are not in a position to walk away; we can part but not leave. Face to face some things are impossible to say. It’ll never do somehow. I think of telling X that we think too much alike. I imagine writing down a song and handing it to X in a note: You say either and I say either You say neither and I say neither Either Either Neither Neither Let’s call the whole thing off. You say tomato and I say tomato You say potato and I say potato Tomato Tomato Potato Potato Let’s call the whole thing off.