In a recent Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes of the soon-to-be-completed 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero and the complex algorithm developed to order the names of the dead in the memorial’s bronze panels. An alphabetical ordering of the victims’ names would do nothing to summon the complex relationships among the dead, which associations the designers hoped somehow to represent in the arrangement of names in the monument’s parapet. Some computer scientists doubted that it could be done, but a solution was found, ultimately, and I found the conclusion to Paumgarten’s piece worth comment:
A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one. – Nick Paumgarten, The Names. The New Yorker. May 16, 2011, 40.
What is the difference between chaos and divine order? Is the world we live in chaotic or is it ordered, and in either case where and how, if at all, does divinity fit in? It would be repellent here to suggest that part of the divine plan involves the mad destruction of so many lives (though, of course, any notion of a divine plan faces this challenge). What I like about Paumgarten’s conclusion is its elegant postulation of the delicate difference between chaos and cosmos. In faith, many believe that we experience glimpses of this faint silhouette, but the silhouette appears to be consistent with its lack.
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