As for Kouska the surgeon, he returned from captivity in the rank of battalion doctor and proceeded to enter the lists of courtship. Evil tongues informed him of the suitors, and particularly of the late Captain Miśnia, R.I.P., who presumably had achieved a more-than-passing acquaintance with the young lady, though at the same time she had been answering the postcards from the prisoner of war. Being by nature fairly impetuous, the surgeon Kouska was prepared to break off the engagement already made, particularly since he had received several letters which the young lady had written to Miśnia (God knows how they ended up in the hands of a malicious person in Prague), along with an anonymous letter explaining how he, Kouska, had been serving the young lady as a fifth wheel, that is, kept in reserve as a stand-by. The breaking off of the engagement did not come about, due to a conversation the surgeon had with his grandfather, who had really been a father to him from childhood because the surgeon’s own father, a profligate and ne’er-do-well, had not raised him at all. The grandfather was an old man of unusually progressive views, and he considered that a young girl’s head was easily turned, especially when the turner wore a uniform and pleaded the soldier’s death that could befall him at any moment.
Kouska thus married the young lady. If, however, he had had a grandfather of other persuasions, or if the old liberal had passed away before his eightieth year, the marriage most certainly would not have taken place. The grandfather, it is true, led an exceedingly healthy mode of life and rigorously took the water cure prescribed by Father Kneipp; but to what extent the ice-cold shower each morning, lengthening the grandfather’s life, increased the chances of Professor B. Kouska’s coming into the world, it is impossible to determine. The father of surgeon Kouska, a disciple of misogyny, would definitely not have interceded in behalf of the maligned maiden; but he had no influence over his son from the time when, having made the acquaintance of Mr. Serge Mdivani, he became the latter’s secretary, went with him to Monte Carlo, and came back believing in a system of breaking the bank in roulette shown him by a certain widow-countess; thanks to this system he lost his entire fortune, was placed under custody, and had to give up his son to the care of his own father. Yet had the surgeon’s father not succumbed to the demon of gambling, his father would then not have disowned him, and—again—the coming to pass of Professor Kouska would not have come to pass.
The factor that tipped the scales in favor of the Professor’s birth was Mr. Serge vel Sergius Mdivani. Sick of his estate in Bosnia, and of his wife and mother-in-law, he engaged Kouska (the surgeon’s father) as his secretary and took off with him for the waters, because Kouska the father knew languages and was a man of the world, whereas Mdivani, notwithstanding his first name, knew no language besides Croatian. But had Mr. Mdivani in his youth been better looked after by his father, then instead of chasing after the chambermaids he would have studied his languages, would not have needed a translator, would not have taken the father of Kouska to the waters, the latter would not have returned from Monte Carlo as a gambler, and thereupon would not have been cursed and cast out by his father, who, not taking the surgeon under his wing as a child, would not have instilled liberal principles in him, the surgeon would have broken off with the young lady, and—once more—Professor Benedykt Kouska would not have made his appearance in this world. Now, Mr. Mdivani’s father was not disposed to keep an eye on the progress of his son’s education when the latter was supposed to be studying languages, because this son, by his looks, reminded him of a certain dignitary of the church concerning whom Mr. Mdivani Sr. harbored the suspicion that he, the dignitary, was the true father of little Sergius. Feeling, therefore, a subconscious dislike for little Sergius, he neglected him; as a result of this neglect Sergius did not learn, as he should have, his languages.
The question of the identity of the boy’s father was in fact complicated, because even the mother of little Sergius was not certain whether he was the son of her husband or of the parish priest, and she did not know for sure whose son he was because she believed in stares that affected the unborn. She believed in stares that affected the unborn because her authority in all things was her Gypsy grandmother. We are now speaking, it should be noted, of the relation between the grandmother of the mother of little Sergius Mdivani and the chances of the birth of Professor Benedykt Kouska. Mdivani was born in the year 1861, his mother in 1832, and the Gypsy grandmother in 1798. So, then, matters that transpired in Bosnia and Herzegovina toward the close of the eighteenth century—in other words, 130 years before the birth of Professor Kouska—exerted a very real influence on the probability distribution of his coming into the world. But neither did the Gypsy grandmother appear in a void. She did not wish to marry an Orthodox Croat, particularly since at that time all Yugoslavia was under the Turkish Yoke, and marriage to a giaour would bode no good for her. But the Gypsy maid had an uncle much older than she; he had fought under Napoleon; it was said that he had taken part in the retreat of the Grand Army from the environs of Moscow. In any case, from his soldiering under the Emperor of the French he returned home with the conviction that interdenominational differences were of no great matter, for he had had a close look at the differences of war, therefore he encouraged his niece to marry the Croat, for, though a giaour, it was a good and comely youth. In marrying the Croat, the grandmother on Mr. Mdivani’s mother’s side thus increased the chances of Professor Kouska’s birth. As for the uncle, he would not have fought under Napoleon had he not been living during the Italian campaign in the region of the Apennines, whither he was sent by his master, a sheep farmer, with a consignment of sheepskin coats. He was waylaid by a mounted patrol of the Imperial Guard and given the choice of enlisting or becoming a camp follower; he preferred to bear arms. Now, if the Gypsy uncle’s master had not raised sheep, or if, raising them, he had not made sheepskin coats, for which there was a demand in Italy, and if he had not sent this uncle to Italy with the coats, then the mounted patrol would not have seized the Gypsy uncle, whereupon, not fighting his way across Europe, this uncle, his conservative opinions intact, would not have encouraged his niece to marry the Croat. And therewith the mother of little Sergius, having no Gypsy grandmother and consequently not believing in stares that affected the unborn, would not have thought that merely from watching the parish priest spread his arms as he sang in a bass at the altar one could bear a son—the spit and image of the priest; and so, her conscience completely clear, she would not have feared her husband, she would have defended herself against the charges of infidelity, the husband, no longer seeing evil in the looks of little Sergius, would have minded the boy’s education, Sergius would have learned his languages, would not have needed anyone as a translator, whereat the father of Kouska the surgeon would not have gone off with him to the waters, would not have become a gambler and a wastrel, would (being a misogynist) have urged his surgeon son to throw over the young lady for her dalliance with the late Captain Miśnia, R.I.P., as a result of which there would have been, again, no Professor B. Kouska in the world.
But now observe. So far we have examined the probability spectrum of the birth of Professor Kouska on the assumption that both his facultative parents existed, and we reduced the probability of that birth only by introducing very small, perfectly credible changes in the behavior of the father or mother of Professor Kouska, changes brought about by the actions of third parties (General Samsonov, the Gypsy grandmother, the mother of Mdivani, Baron Hamuras, the French governess of Major General Prchl, Emperor Francis Joseph I, the Archduke Ferdinand, the Wright brothers, the surgeon for the Baron’s hernia, Marika’s otorhinolaryngologist, etc.). But surely the very same type of analysis can be applied to the chances of the coming into the world of the young lady who as a nurse married the surgeon Kouska, or for that matter to the surgeon himself. Billions, trillions of circumstances had to occur as they did occur for the young lady to come into the world and for the future surgeon Kouska to come into the world. And in analogous fashion, innumerable multitudes of
occurrences conditioned the coming into the world of their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. It would seem to require no argumentation that, for example, had the tailor Ylastimil Kouska, born in 1673, not come into the world, there could not have been, by virtue of that, his son, or his grandson, or his great-grandson, or thus the great-grandfather of Kouska the surgeon, or thus Kouska the surgeon himself, or indeed Professor Benedykt.
But the same reasoning holds for those ancestors of the line of the Kouskas and the line of the nurse who were not at all human yet, being creatures who led a quadrumanous and arboreal existence in the Lower Eolithic, when the first Paleopithecanthropus, having overtaken one of these quadrumanes and perceiving that it was a female with which he had to deal, possessed her beneath the eucalyptus tree that grew in the place where today stands the Mala Strana in Prague. As a result of the mixing of the chromosomes of that lubricious Paleopithecanthropus and that quadrumanous protohuman primatrice, there arose that type of meiosis and that linkage of gene loci which, transmitted through the next thirty thousand generations, produced on the visage of the young lady nurse that very smile, faintly reminiscent of the smile of Mona Lisa, from the canvas of Leonardo, which so enchanted the young surgeon Kouska. But this same eucalyptus could have grown, could it not, four meters away, in which case the quadrumaness, fleeing from the Paleopithecanthropus that pursued her, would not have stumbled on the tree’s thick root and gone sprawling, and therewith, clambering up the tree in time, would not have got pregnant, and if she had not got pregnant, then, transpiring a bit differently, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the taking by the Turks of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Moscow campaign of Napoleon, as well as several dozen trillion like events, undergoing minimal changes, would have led to a situation in which in no wise could Professor Benedykt Kouska any longer have been born, from which we can see that the range of the chances of his existence contains within it a subclass of probabilities that comprises the distribution of all the eucalyptus trees that grew in the location of modern-day Prague roughly 349,000 years ago. Now, those eucalyptuses grew there because, while fleeing from sabertoothed tigers, great herds of weakened mammoths had eaten their fill of eucalyptus flowers and then, suffering indigestion from them (the flower sorely stings the palate), had drunk copious quantities of water from the Vltava; that water, having at the time purgative properties, caused them to evacuate en masse, thanks to which eucalyptus seeds were planted where previously eucalypti had never been; but had the water not been sulfurized by the influx of a mountain tributary of the then Vltava, the mammoths, not getting the runs from it, would not have occasioned the growing of the eucalytpus grove on the site of what is now Prague, the quadrumanal female would not have gone sprawling in her flight from the Paleopithecanthropus, and there would not have arisen that gene locus which imparted to the face of the young lady the Mona Lisa-like smile that captivated the young surgeon; and so, but for the diarrhea of the mammoths, Professor Benedykt Kouska also would have not come into the world. It should be noted, moreover, that the water of the Vltava underwent sulfurization approximately two and a half million years B.C., this on account of a displacement in the main geosyncline of the tectonic formation that was then giving rise to the center of the Tatra Mountains; this formation caused the expulsion of sulfurous gases from the marlacious strata of the Lower Jurassic, because in the region of the Dinaric Alps there was an earthquake, which was caused by a meteor that had a mass on the order of a million tons; this meteor came from a swarm of Leonids, and had it fallen not in the Dinaric Alps but a little farther on, the geosyncline would not have buckled, the sulfurous deposit would not have reached the air and sulfurized the Vltava, and the Vltava would not have caused the diarrhea of the mammoths, from which one can see that had a meteor not fallen 2.5 million years ago on the Dinaric Alps, Professor Kouska then, too, could not have been born.
Professor Kouska calls attention to the erroneous conclusion which some people are inclined to draw from his argument. They think that from what has just been set forth it follows that the entire Universe, mind you, is something in the nature of a machine, a machine so assembled and working in such a way as to enable Professor Kouska to be born. Obviously, this is complete nonsense. Let us imagine that, a billion years before its genesis, an observer wishes to compute the chances of the Earth’s coming into being. He will not be able to foresee exactly what shape the planet-making vortex will give to the nucleus of the future Earth; he can compute neither its future mass nor its chemical composition with any degree of precision. Nonetheless he predicts, on the basis of his knowledge of astrophysics, and of his familiarity with the theory of gravitation and the theory of star structure, that the Sun will have a family of planets and that among these planets there will revolve about it a planet No. 3, counting from the center of the system out; and this same planet may be considered Earth, though it look different from what the prediction has declared, because a planet ten billion tons heavier than the Earth or having two small moons instead of one large, or covered with oceans over a higher percentage of its surface, would still be, surely, an Earth.
On the other hand, a Professor Kouska predicted by someone half a million years B.C., should he be born as a two-legged marsupial or as a yellow-skinned woman, or as a Buddhist monk, would obviously no longer be Professor Kouska, albeit—perhaps—still a person. For objects such as suns, planets, clouds, rocks, are not in any way unique, whereas all living organisms are unique. Each man is, as it were, the first prize in a lottery, in the kind of lottery, moreover, where the winning ticket is a teragigamegamulticentillion-to-one shot. Why, then, do we not daily feel the astronomically monstrous minuteness of the chance of our own or another’s coming into the world? For the reason, answers Professor Kouska, that even in the case of that which is most unlikely to happen, if it happens, then it happens! And also because in an ordinary lottery we see the vast number of losing tickets along with the single one that wins, whereas in the lottery of existence the tickets that miss are nowhere to be seen. “The chances that lose in the lottery of being are invisible!” explains Professor Kouska. For, surely, to lose in that sweepstakes amounts to not being born, and he who has not been born cannot be said to be, not a whit. We quote the author now, starting on line 24 on page 619 of Volume I (De Impossibilitate Vitae):
“Some people come into the world as the issue of unions that were arranged long in advance, on both the spear and distaff sides, so that the future father of the given individual and his future mother, even when children, were destined for each other. A man who sees the light of day as a child of such a marriage might receive the impression that the probability of his existence was considerable, in contradistinction to one who learns that his father met his mother in the course of the great migrations of wartime, or that quite simply he was conceived because some hussar of Napoleon, while making his escape from the Berezina, took not only a mug of water from the lass he came upon at the edge of the village but also her maidenhead. To such a man it might seem that had the hussar hurried more, feeling the Cossack hundreds at his back, or had his mother not been looking for God knows what at the edge of the village, but stayed at home by the chimney corner as befitted her, then he would never have been, or in other words that the chance of his existence hung on a thread in comparison with the chance of him whose parents had been destined for each other in advance.
“Such notions are mistaken, because it makes absolutely no sense to assert that the calculation of the probability of anyone’s birth has to be begun from the coming into the world of the future father and the future mother of the given individual. Making that the zero point on the probability scale. If we have a labyrinth composed of a thousand rooms connected by a thousand doors, then the probability of going from the beginning to the end of the labyrinth is determined by the sum of all the choices in all the consecutive rooms through which passes the seeker of the way, and not by the isolated probability of hi
s finding the right door in some single room. If he takes a wrong turn in room No. 100, then he will be every bit as lost and as likely not to regain his freedom as if he took the wrong turn in the first or the thousandth room. Similarly, there is no reason to assert that only my birth was subject to the laws of chance, whereas the births of my parents were not so subject, or those of their parents, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, grandmothers, greatgrandmothers, etc., back to the birth of life on Earth. And it makes no sense to say that the fact of any specific human individual’s existence is a phenomenon of very low probability. Very low, relative to what? From where is the calculation to be made? Without the fixing of a zero point, i.e., of a beginning place for a scale of computation, measurement—and therefore the estimation of probability—becomes an empty word.
“It does not follow, from my reasoning, that my coming into the world was assured or predetermined back before the Earth took form; quite the contrary, what follows is that I could not have been at all and no one would have so much as noticed. Everything that statistics has to say on the subject of the prognostication of individual births is rubbish. For it holds that every man, howsoever unlikely he be in himself, is still possible as a realization of certain chances; meanwhile, I have demonstrated that, having before one any individual whatever—Mucek the baker, for example—one can say the following: it is possible to select a moment in the past, a moment prior to his birth, such that the prediction of Mucek the baker’s coming to be, made at that moment, will have a probability as near zero as desired. When my parents found themselves in the marriage bed, the chances of my coming into the world worked out to, let us say, one in one hundred thousand (taking into account, among other things, the infant mortality rate, fairly high in wartime). During the siege of the fortress of Przemyśl the chances of my being born equaled only one in a billion; in the year 1900, one in a trillion; in 1800, one in a quadrillion, and so on. A hypothetical observer computing the chances of my birth under the eucalyptus, at the Mala Strana in the time of the Interglacial, after the migration of the mammoths and their stomach disorder, would set the chances of my ever seeing the light of day at one in a centillion. Magnitudes of the order of giga appear when the point of estimation is moved back a billion years, of the order of tera, back three billion years, etc.
A Perfect Vacuum Page 16
