Ockham's razor is a principle that favors simplicity, parsimony, and succinctness. It follows: if we are to accept that the simplest explanations are always more favorable than the complex, yet equally-reasonable ones, we could logically concede (1) the shortest distance between two points is indeed a straight line, (2) our cosmic model is indeed heliocentric, (3) lovers do eventually find each other. We think about a man and his wife in their bedroom. The man is in his chair, the woman standing. He tells her: take off all your clothes. Don't be ridiculous, she says. Take off all your clothes, he repeats, more deliberate this time, pointing his finger also. She feels helpless; she does not know what to do. So she takes off all her clothes for him. She takes them off one by one, throws each one at him with hatred while he sits in his chair. Turn around and look at me, he says. Why is he making her do this? Why does the woman listen? We could produce familiar explanations. We could say that he did not like the look she gave that lone man in the supermarket earlier this morning, or the way her face looked staring out the window during the flight back from Connecticut as if searching on the ground for someone she once knew. And why does she? Perhaps she is afraid of him as equally as he is afraid of her-- she finds uncomfortable the way he blows his nose every so often, or the way he plays with his fingers, the way he sits in his chair directing her in his own film. Or perhaps all of these are incorrect. They are incorrect because they are complex. So logically, we invoke Ockham's razor. The shortest distance between two points is not a line that travels from origin to destination and doubles back, heliocentrism is a model that does not extend beyond our observable solar system. We say that the man tells the woman to take off all her clothes simply because he loves her. We say she agrees to do so simply because she reciprocates. And we agree to this not because of its validity, but because of its immediacy, its clarity.
