On Counting - On Number, Proportion, and the Legible Life

Do you remember learning to count, and what do you count today more than anything else? This lyric-philosophical essay treats counting as the first metaphysics, a vigil kept against forgetting, and follows the number thirty-three through its recurrences: the years tradition gives Jesus, the thirty-two namings of Elohim in Genesis 1 before the Name is spoken, the Vedic gods and Trāyastriṃśa, Dante's cantos, the segments of the developing spine. Thirty-three is not a Fibonacci number. It stands one short of thirty-four, while the ratios of the sequence swing above and below the golden ratio without arriving, and Cassini's identity makes the gap of one exact. Number 33's forty-two stations, the Egyptian forty-two assessors and Matthew's forty-two generations set a second count beside the first. The essay names the shadow of pattern-seeking (apophenia, patternicity, the law of truly large numbers), reads Jung's synchronicity as meaning located in the one who notices, and closes on Weil's attention, counted prayer and meditation: to count a life is not to prove it was planned but to love it.