So he let his own water run

Today is the birthday of Anton Chekhov (born 1860), the Russian dramatist and short-story artist.


"And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryaobavich an aimless, unintelligible jest...The water was running, he knew not where or why...It had flowed into a great river, from the great river into the sea; then it had risen in vapor, turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was running now before his eyes again...And why? For what purpose? -- "The Kiss."

   What had God hoped for, creating the universe? What was His goal? It had to have been a whim, Sully thought, a caprice, and given that, how could you take it seriously? How could you take yourself seriously? If God didn’t have a clue.  --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.

And even in teeny weeny bits

New Year's Eve. Another year is over.

These words from writer Walter Savage Landor will serve to sum up the year:

"Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd."

As a kid, and again as a college student, Sully had loved Dickens. The many coincidences in Dickens’ novels confirmed his suspicion that the universe was much smaller than anyone knew, too small to get away from anyone. Taking the word coincidence to mean the simultaneous occurrence of separate events, then there were an almost infinite number of coincidences happening every second, weren’t there? An individual’s consciousness was simply the mediator between these events, forging connections that would not have existed otherwise.  --  Chapter 29, The Misforgotten.