I am slightly unnerved in a strange city when I go out to buy the morning's newspaper. The vendor or dispenser has a paper waiting just for me. When I return home I ask at the kiosk if there was a spare unsold paper a couple of days ago. There never was. Someone else was there to buy mine.
Actually, it happens to me in familiar cities, too. Not being a creature of habit in every respect, I go through phases (for instance) of buying Japanese ingredients, Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Indian... Every time I look for akamiso at Sunrise Mart or coriander chutney at Little India Stores or camembert at Fairway or dried dates at Manhattan Fruit Exchange or whatever moves my fancy at my local supermarkets, there it is on the shelf, though I come only a few times
a year and irregularly. (Only at Trader Joe's, where I always look for the same things, do I often find someone else has beat me to what I'm looking for.)There's a deeper point to this, and it's not that food markets actually throw away a lot of unsold food, though I'm sure that's true too. It has something to do with the incredibly complicated balancing act which is the modern economy, and helps account for my sense that it can unravel in no time flat (and is, of course). But it's something deeper than that, too, or broader - it has something to do with the rhythms of the larger reality in which we participate. Last summer I fumblingly called it the regular irregularity of the world. I'm not quite sure what it all is, but I'm hopeful Ian Hacking, in whose The Taming of Chance (p. 117) I found the aperçu above, will account for it. His study is about the discovery of statistical laws in the 19th century, and - believe it or not - thrillingly interesting.
