Numbered thoughts and David Foster Wallace

Actually my thoughts are not numbered – I am nowhere near that organized – but numbers do figure in my thoughts by times. I am not obsessed with them, like some people who cannot keep themselves from counting almost everything in their lives, but I do pay attention to numbers and do sometimes play with them in my head. Any time someone has a birthday, or even tells me their age, I usually comment on the number, like whether or not it’s prime, and what its factors are if it isn’t, and whether any of the numbers are lucky ones (like 3, 7, or 13), and where it figures on a numerological scale of life’s stages, and so on, because there are always places you can go with numbers if you want to play with them.

When I was teaching in Istanbul, an educator named Bambi Betts, who was much smarter and more astute than her name might suggest, reported on some research she had recently read that indicated that doing mental math exercises at the beginning of a lesson enhanced student learning no matter what the subject of the lesson. It won’t surprise you, I guess, to learn that I liked the idea and that it made sense to me; after all, I sometimes do mental math for no particular reason other than that I like it, and that fact alone could suggest that I am bright and alert and open to learning. So my IB English class always started with mental math exercises, conducted sometimes by me and sometimes by my students. Not everyone loved it equally, but it became a ritual of Mr. Field’s English class that we couldn’t start without, no matter how urgent it was to cover the writing of commentaries or what our latest thoughts of 1984 or Macbeth were.

There aren’t really a lot of numbers in my life, since I am mostly a language person, and I’ve never really got started with Sudoku (which is something I figure I should try), and I don’t have people around to play cribbage with (we’re all too busy, I think, except for in the summer when we rent a cottage at the beach), but I do have numbers in the car, specifically in the odometer.

I am not sure exactly how it works, but my eye occasionally happens to glance at the odometer numbers right when there is something significant going on, like a bunch of zeroes, or a bunch of nines about to turn into zeroes. I think it must be peripheral vision kicking in, though it sometimes feels more like telepathy to me, and there is always a small kick of pleasure at seeing a nice display of digits, like when the car turned over 120000 km not so long ago and a sense of surprise when I do catch it.

David Foster Wallace, whose collection of short fiction, The Girl with Curious Hair (W.W. Norton 1989), I finished a short time ago, paid attention to numbers. I will tell you only that right now, though there is so much more I could say about how his writing seems to be a manifestation of his thinking in action, and how wonderful it is to read his work and find yourself moving through his thinking as it is realized in the text. So he did pay attention to numbers – in fact, in 2003 he published Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity — and odometer numbers figured in the final story in the collection, “Westward the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way” in this way:

“Hey, man, three miles,” the clown says, squinting past the furry steering wheel’s axis. “Three more miles, then the odometer rolls over. To all zeroes. That’s two hundred thousand on this baby. That’s a big varoom, when the odom—“

“Shut up, shitspeck.” p 296

and

The odometer gets extremely close to rolling over. p 313

and then

D.L. and DeHaven are watching the odometer finally roll all the way over. It’s exciting and gorgeous. There’s a slot-machine feel about it, which they share, together, and know they share it. pp 317-318

As Wallace said, it was “exciting and gorgeous”, and I know what he means. It was, in fact, one of those ephemeral moments that can happen when you’re driving, something you need to be there for and notice, like when our old Subaru turned 100000 km driving up the west coast of Newfoundland, something you can’t go back to when it’s gone.

I am also fond of palindromic numbers, which come around much more often in the odometer than the big hundred thousand rollovers. The last one I caught was 120021, and it happened for a whole kilometre on Purcell's Cove Road between the Yacht Squadron and Williams Lake Road. I had to be careful as I drove, since I was glancing down at those numbers to savour them before they changed. It was not as bad as talking on your mobile while you’re driving, and it’s not yet illegal, but this odometer number thing could be something to worry about if it started catching on and got out of hand (though I think there’s little chance of this small idiosyncrasy going viral any time soon).

I thought I would get the next one, because the odometer read 121120 when I parked in the driveway, and I knew what a pretty palindrome awaited me when I next drove out. You might wonder why I didn’t turn around and drive just one more kilometre so I could catch it, but I didn’t, probably because it would have felt like cheating or manipulating the system, and I ended up missing it. Maybe it was because I headed out in the morning without noticing or else Lorraine was the next to drive the car, but I did miss it. And you can’t go back. Nothing to do but think ahead to the next one, but I also missed it, 122221, which would have been another nice array of digits to look at, so now I have to wait for 123321.

The reading is 123237, so I just need 84 more km to get there. I hope I catch it because it’ll be a good one. But if I don’t there’s always 124421 waiting somewhere down the road. Or I guess I could take up Sudoku.