Childhood Brushes with Infinity, & Another Important Reason Why I Love My Fuzzy Mathematician

What inspired me to take my private musings public in the first place is the idea of infinity, a concept that has fascinated me since I can remember having concepts at all. Granted, my memory is shoddy and untrustworthy, though at best, it can be imaginative[1].

I remember a storytime in the first grade. The teacher was reading some children’s book that had the word “dozen” in it. She stopped to ask, “Does anyone know how many a dozen is?” I raised my hand with shameless enthusiasm, and she called on me. “More than a million!” I exclaimed. When I was corrected with the actual mere two-digit integer, I was very, very embarrassed. My excitement about inconceivable concepts (at the time, “more than a million” was inconceivable) was, as they say in therapy, very vulnerable-making. And I didn’t realize it was vulnerable-making to me until I exposed myself. It was as if I were to start happily diddling myself in class, totally unaware that it was not the done thing until I realized it was. (Maybe that’s an exaggerated analogy, but aren’t the fun ones always so?)

I remember shortly after that discovering the concept of a googolplex. I found the term in some funky children’s book in the school library.[2] I quickly resorted to dropping this word into casual speech (showoff, yes, but enthusiasm for mind-blowing concepts, moreso), such as “I bet you a googolplex dollars you can’t do it.” Clearly, my grasp of largeness was approaching infinity, that is, headed in the right direction, but it was not there yet, not even close.

Soon though, maybe about age twelve, I started getting it. I started getting it before bedtime, when I shared a room with my sister. We had all sorts of nighttime games and rituals (maybe another time I’ll tell you some), but one regular routine is one in which I would rhapsodize on the limitlessness of infinity, saying things like, “The universe doesn’t end! It just keeps going,” and getting exasperated by her response, “Yeah but Wendy, what if there wasn’t a world?” A thought which I thought was juvenile and irrelevant and clearly showed that she didn’t get it. So we’d lay there puzzling in our own private philosophical conundrums, thinking each other’s own private philosophical conundrums were not really even worth thinking about, actually.

But little did I know it, my kid sister was to soon advance in ways I didn’t know you could even advance in. Like, for example, by experimenting with mind-altering drugs. In just a few short years, my little sister, who used to copy and follow me in all sorts of ways (to the point where her intrafamily nickname was ‘Me Too’) was now an antiestablishment Gothy New Wave[3] teen who now clearly despised everything I ever stood for. Plus, as I was to find out more than a decade later, she was stealing the chunky chocolate bars I was selling to fundraise for my numerous geeky extracurricular activities—and then selling them at a bargain-basement discount—and then using the money to buy LSD and other recreational delights. (Meanwhile, I would be counting my inventory, thinking, Gosh, I know I ate some of my own candy bars, but I didn’t realize I ate so many! and realizing that I’d have to fork over a good chunk of my allowance money for those many candy bars I’d apparently eaten. So in essence, this here 3.9 GPA Honors high-school student was funding my baby sister’s recreational drug use.)

By the time I first (and last) took LSD myself, I was 17. I was at a party, and all sorts of not-good things were happening. One of which was that my boyfriend, having heard the news that I’d just taken a tab of acid, left the party in disgust, stranding me. Another of which was that about a half-hour after I took the acid, my ex-boyfriend (who I still thought I loved) showed up with his new girlfriend, who had an irrational hatred for me—to the point of threatening and insulting crank phone calls—despite the fact that the dude had dumped me in no uncertain terms and that I was really a pretty nice person, actually.[4]

When I got home that night, it had only just then started to kick in. I was alone, in my room, and everyone was asleep except for my little sister, who stayed up late every night, burning candles and crying to The Smiths. I was getting scared of what was happening, starting to worry I was going to go crazy. So I knocked on her door. She and I never talked anymore, but I suspected she might have some experience with my problem and could maybe help. She opened the door and let me in, and when I confessed to her that I was tripping and scared, she laughed, ruefully. But then she said she’d help me out, and took me back to my room. She did not help me out. She did, however, have some fun at my expense before she got tired and left me to my own whacked-out mental devices again.

Which brings me back to my infinity-relevant point: One such mental device that my sister stranded me with was a drawing I did of a cylinder, with ∞ as its length and “3 inches” (for some reason) as its diameter. I tripped long and hard on this drawing, trying to conceive how such an object—clearly infinite in volume—could conceptually exist in infinite space without “taking up” all of said infinite space. Was there more than one kind of infinity? I even went so far as to bring the drawing to my calculus teacher the following Monday. He nodded at the drawing, looked at me strangely, acknowledged that it was weird, and didn’t have anything more to say (I didn’t go to the greatest high school in the United States).

So. Those were my childhood musings on infinity and beyond. And apparently (I do use that word a lot, don’t I; guess it belies my inherent mistrust of perception) I’m still fascinated with the subject.

It comes up today because I started reading, late last night, David Foster Wallace’s Everything & More: A Compact History of ∞. Partially because he died almost two years ago exactly today; partially for other reasons. I’d tried to read the book before—as I want to read and understand everything he ever wrote, bless his tortured soul—but I couldn’t wrap my brain around this one because it’s challenging logically and mathematically, not just linguistically, for the likes of me.

Luckily, this time, I have a highly trained mathematician in tow: my man, Benoit. I’ve been reading it to him, and I can tap him to explain notions that, for me, do not compute. He is an excellent teacher, and I find myself—and I use these words quite precisely—feeling giddy with delight, and more in love with him than ever, for being able to engage with me on this level: to speak clearly, explain thoroughly but not condescendingly, and with an open mind to my layperson questions and challenges.

Stay tuned for discussions of adulthood brushes with infinity, brought to you in part by my beloved fuzzy mathematician.

[1] Take, for example, my childhood memory (ca. age seven) in which my mom told me that the woman in the bed next to her at the maternity ward gave birth to a “mongloid” (see my short story “Could Not Be Pictured” for a fictional flight-of-fancy based on that now apparently dubious memory). When I finally got around to asking her about it, for the first time, I was an adult. And my mom looked at me like a crazy person. She said that not only did she not tell me that story, but that it never happened. I could go into more detail here, but suffice it to say that it seems pretty clear that my mom’s memory of that never happening seems just as strong as my memory of it happening. But whether or not it happened is beyond the point; the point is that I “remembered” it, and how can you remember things that didn’t happen? Take, for example, my friend Alexis, who swears to god that she remembers, as a child, being able to float down the staircase of her childhood home. And of course, take David Foster Wallace’s brilliant short story “Nothing Happened” (printed sometimes under the title “Signifying Nothing”) for a truly excellent foray into the weird and giggle-inducing discomfort of improbable recovered memories. And, if you read on, you’ll see that the David Foster Wallace thing is pertinent to the origination of this blog in general.

[2] A googol is a 1 with a hundred zeros after it, or in other words, 10^100. That alone was enough to blow my mind. But a googolplex was the child’s-mind equivalent, to me, of acid-on-acid: A 10 to the power of google, or 10 to the power of 10¹⁰⁰.

[3] Yes, you could be both in the 80s somehow.

[4] Here’s another memory anecdote. I remember sitting on the floor at the party and looking over at them, the ex and the ex’s new girlfriend, in the kitchen. The new girlfriend was holding a very large kitchen knife, sitting at the table, and looking at me while touching the tip of the knife with her finger. Scary, right? Many years later, I saw her in the Diablo Valley College parking lot. I was walking to my car; she to the bus stop. I said hi to her, and she remembered me. I offered her a ride. In the car, I asked her about the ex. She laughed about how lame he was after all; we both laughed about how lame he was after all. Then I gently approached the knife thing, in a nonthreatening (if possible), nonaccusatory way: “Hey, I was kind of out of it that night, but do you remember vaguely threatening me with a kitchen knife?” Needless to say, she denied that she had done such a thing. Rather believeably, too. Of course, I had taken acid, and all I can say in defense of the memory was that it seemed to me that it had not kicked in yet when that happened. In fact, it didn’t seem to kick in until well after I scored a ride home.