I began reading “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” for my psychiatry class today. It is a novel narrated by a 15-year-old autistic boy named Christopher. I’m enjoying the book, which is enjoyable, insightful, and poignant all at once, and sometimes I come across a quote that is just awesome. Like the following:
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
There have been many, many times in my life where I have felt exactly this way. I get the feeling that everything that happen in my life makes sense on some level, but if I were to try to sit down and explain why it makes sense, I could never adequately do it. I think, perhaps, the same realization is at least partially behind expressions of inevitability, like the many so-called Murphy’s Laws.
I also think that when you get the opportunity to get inside Christopher’s mind in this book, you (or at least I) begin to realize that his way of experiencing the world is not completely foreign to you. There are aspects of his personality and thought process that I very much identify with, and though someone else may not identify with the same parts, I think most people probably identify with him at least a little bit.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the book, and I wanted to share that quote and my thoughts on it, now it’s time for me to hit my texts again.
I don’t know that I have ever thought about life or primes that way before. But it makes a lot of sense. Life is a pattern all its own. I shall have to ponder this more.