four hundred thousand years
If I could condense the whole of human history, I could reduce it to the fact that it has existed for four hundred thousand years. The premise is this: an observer of the universe watches the progression of our existence from beginning to end. In this state of extended observation, he watches them evolve from single-celled organisms, populate islands and landforms, create civilizations, and lay siege to one another's city walls. He watches as generations of fabulists and revisionist historians tell and retell sequences of events. Over millennia, he notices that this sequence is nothing but select single events in recursion. What I mean is: each incident, each action is a single occurrence in an iterative series. Therefore, we take single episodes and we repeat them four hundred thousand times. An old man pays a shopkeeper for his goods four hundred thousand times. The Greek army marches up to the walls of Troy four hundred thousand times. Medea kills her own children four hundred thousand times. A child drops his ice cream four hundred thousand times. If we apply this extraordinary logic, we can no longer say the universe is a chaotic, meaningless sequence of events. Instead, it is the very opposite. A boy trips over a crack in the sidewalk four hundred thousand times. A man meets a woman four hundred thousand times. He makes love to her four hundred thousand times and she says she loves him four hundred thousand times.
In fact, if you take anything and repeat it four hundred thousand times, a precursor to change begins to appear. On our six hundred and first conversation, the details of the sentence I have been repeating to you will alter. It will have been a brown cat that I saw, not a grey one. On our two hundred thousandth meeting, it will be in park instead of a waiting room. If the collision of two contingent forces allows, we could continue this. There will never be the dilemma of what to talk about, if anything at all. In fact, I can all but employ a synonym for a word in our recursive dialogue and you would never notice. On our three hundred thousand and fiftieth meeting, I could discuss the way your slender fingers curl or I could even lose you completely to someone else. Hypothetically, we could be like the observer, watching our meetings from light-years away, at times remarking on their parity, at times commenting on their alterity. Like the germ of an idea, we could do this, one, two, three, four times, over and over and over again.
