The Adventures of Rudi the Rational Man

The Adventures of Rudi the Rational Man

By Michael Witbeck

Copyright 2013 Michael Witbeck

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Question from Master Chuang

1. Rudi Starts to Wonder about the Post Office

2. The Excluded Middle

3. The Unemployment Office

4. Martin's Escape

5. The True Nature of Freedom

6. The Ostensible Rhonda

7. The Second Letter

8. Rudi Ventures Out

9. Rudi Studies Spanish

10. The Arc of Intention

11. The Invisible Hand

12. The Alter Ego

13. The Grand Marshalling of the Selves

14. The Affair to Remember

About The Author

About This Book

***

Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words?

--Chuang Tzu--

***

1. Rudi Starts to Wonder about the Post Office

As we first meet Rudi, we find that he is spending most of his time waiting at home for an important communication concerning his future that he expects to receive through the mail. It is not certain when this communication will arrive nor, sad to say, is it certain that it will arrive at all, nor is it certain that even if it does arrive it will contain a message that Rudi wants to hear. Of these difficulties Rudi is perfectly aware. Being a rational man, however, he has accepted this state of affairs and, further, being a man prone to some rational speculation when it is based on the solid evidence of worldly experience, he has come to the tentative conclusion that the world outside himself can be interpreted to the effect that this present situation, his uncertainty, that is, as to when or even if the communication will arrive as well as his state of doubt about what it might contain, while not being an ideal situation, far from it, is nevertheless all that a rational man could realistically predict, hope for, or expect, more or less, from this said world.

Consequently Rudi has decided to take his waiting not as a source of anguish and distress but rather as the source of some modicum of hope and has further decided that there is no good reason that this waiting should not be taken, after all, quite seriously. These were, of course, rational decisions on his part, based not on despair, frustration or utter despondency on the one hand nor yet upon petty and superficial flippancy of purpose on the other, but rather upon the more reasonable premise that, for Rudi at least, there was nothing else to be done. Thus Rudi waits, not intermittently at intervals either regular or irregular, but continually and steadfastly at all times and under all circumstances excepting only when he is asleep, which is, as a matter of fact, much of the time, now that he is unemployed. Not that he—or we, dear readers—can be sure that Rudi does not also wait while he is sleeping, but it does seem that none of us have access to Rudi during those times, so never mind. During the time that he is not sleeping, however, Rudi’s waiting can be seen as consisting of two distinct kinds, both of which offer potentially fruitful lines of analysis. This is true chiefly because Rudi’s periods of wakefulness, which as we have seen are congruent with his periods of waiting, vary in a quite regular way depending upon the hour of the day; that is, between the hours of 10:30am and 1:30pm Rudi waits actively, except of course when he is asleep, while between the hours of 1:30pm and 10:30am Rudi waits passively, again excepting Rudi’s periods of blissful slumber, which are not inconsiderable but which do not, in the end, yield themselves to useful analysis. It remains only to explain these particular times and to infer, if possible, their meaning, a task which is not likely to cause any real difficulty because since Rudi is a rational man, it follows naturally that there are rational reasons for the division of his waking hours into two separate and distinct periods, one between the hours of 10:30am and 1:30pm and the other between the hours of 1:30pm and 10:30am.

Upon preliminary analysis, this problem resolves itself into two more basic questions: first how to explain the change at 10:30am from passive to active waiting, and second how to explain the change at 1:30pm from active to passive waiting. Before proceeding further it should be noted that the answers to these questions are likely to be of one of two different kinds. That is, they may be simple answers or they may be complex answers. Relatedly they may be, if past experience is any guide, either subtle and murky answers or clear and easily apprehensible answers. Rudi, as he considers these matters, decides that in order for inquiry not to become too cumbersome, it will be convenient to combine certain of these terms of analysis. Hence it is postulated that clear and easily apprehensible answers can be most profitably allied with simple answers while subtle and murky answers can be very usefully allied with more complex answers. In fact, to combine these terms in any other way, for example, to ally clear and easily apprehensible answers with complex answers and subtle and murky answers with simple answers would be not only unproductive but silly as could be seen quite clearly by any six year old deaf mute with a brain in his head. Thus the possibilities become clear. The answers to the two questions will be either on the one hand both simple, clear and easily apprehensible or conversely both complex, subtle and murky, or on the other hand either the first one simple, clear and easily apprehensible and the second one subtle, complex and murky or conversely the first one complex, subtle and murky and the second one simple, clear and easily apprehensible.

So far, so good. But as it happens the facts of the case are such that analysis of the first question, that is, the question of why Rudi changes his waiting from passive to active at exactly 10:30am every day of the week excepting Sunday, yields, even after a thorough and rigorous investigation, no answer at all, while the second question, that of why Rudi’s waiting changes from active to passive every day of the week, again excepting Sunday, at 1:30 in the afternoon, seems to involve nothing more than the fact the 1:30pm is the time when Rudi’s letter carrier, every day but Sundays and certain national holidays, either delivers or fails to deliver any letters, cards or other postal communications that have been sent or not sent, some days previous, to Rudi’s address. At first glance these facts may seem to resolve into a simple case of one complex subtle and murky answer to question number one and one simple clear and easily apprehensible answer to question number two. This, however, would be a dangerous assumption to make, as Rudi would be the first to realize, for it is patently clear that in the first case, that is, in the case where no amount of diligent effort yields any answer at all, the lack of an answer precludes any certain knowledge as to the nature of that answer, this being obvious even to a blind freshman in a church school. It is all very well to say that it is likely that the first question does indeed have a subtle, murky and complex answer and thus explain the quite extraordinary difficulty of finding any answer at all, but it is also clear that to accept this line of reasoning is to deny the possibility that with that the addition of perhaps just one hitherto unknown fact the question might turn out to be very far from complex, subtle and murky even to the point of being not only simple and clear but extremely so and that to deny this possibility would be to make a leap of faith which is wholly unacceptable on logical grounds. Quite bizarre indeed, and Rudi will have none of it.

And then what of the answer to question number two, the question that is as to why Rudi’s waiting changes from active to passive each weekday at exactly 1:30pm and not at one o’clock or at twenty-five minutes to two? Here too one may be tempted to make a clear decision between a simple, clear and easily apprehensible answer on the one hand and a complex, subtle and murky answer on the other and even go so far as to quite forcefully select the former and dismissing the latter without so much as a how do you do at the bus stop. The danger of succumbing to this temptation may not be immediately clear. It can be illustrated quite easily, however, as can so many things, thinks Rudi, by the use of a concrete example, in this case an example such as the following. Granted that Rudi’s mail delivery usually occurs, as has been stated, at 1:30pm on each and every official delivery day, come rain or shine as is well known even to the aged and infirm on the one hand and to surprisingly young children on the other, imagine that on one particular day this mail delivery is late. Imagine that Rudi knows that the delivery is late on this particular day because he has gone, at 1:35pm to that area near the front of his building where the twelve mailboxes are set into a wall and he has seen through the slots in the twelve mailboxes that not only his box but also all the remaining eleven boxes are quite empty of mail of any sort. There are, of course, in addition to the hypothesis that the letter carrier is late today, two other possible explanations for the evidence that Rudi is confronted with, but one of these is quite clearly absurd and the other is not only remotely unlikely on intuitive grounds but mathematically improbable as well. A fourth possibility, that the mail was delivered but them immediately stolen or destroyed by some maniac is too awful to contemplate and will not concern us here. The second possibility, the absurd or ridiculous one, is that the letter carrier has indeed arrived and in fact has left mail in some or all of the boxes but that immediately thereafter all the owners of all the boxes which had received mail have dashed down to the mailbox area and quickly removed it. Is this impossible? No. But to Rudi the idea that a horde of neighbors would all come dashing down, in the middle of the day, all between the hours of 1:30 and 1:35 in the afternoon, merely to check a mailbox which after all is not about to run away, is absurd enough to be quite confidently dismissed from active consideration, if not quite forgotten.

Another possibility, which is intuitively unlikely and mathematically improbable but which would explain the evidence that Rudi sees before him—twelve empty mailboxes plain as the nose on your face—is the idea that none of the twelve residents of Rudi’s building have received any mail on this particular day simply because no one has sent them any. Rudi’s intuitive or instinctive rejection of this possibility can, he feels, be amply supported by mathematical reasoning. Rudi of course does not know the exact volume and frequency of mail delivered to all eleven of his neighbors, but he does know the volume and frequency of the mail delivered to himself, and by conservative extrapolation he can say with confidence that the chances of no mail at all being delivered to any of the twelve boxes on a given day are comfortably high, quite comfortably high, resembling in degree of comfort an overstuffed recliner as might be pictured on the advertising flyer that he might well receive by mail, though in actual fact he had not. The odds were in fact less than one in twelve to the fourth power times three, or, just slightly higher than one in twelve to the third power times four. Hardly a good bet either way!

Having thus disposed of two seemingly possible possibilities and one possibility too awful to contemplate, Rudi is free to return to an analysis of his original hypothesis that the twelve mailboxes are empty at 1:35 in the afternoon because the mail carrier is—as he has sometimes been before—late. But this raises the question of what might be the causes or explanations of this tardiness. Certainty is difficult to achieve in this area, but several immediate avenues do suggest themselves. Perhaps the letter carrier is late merely because the daily volume of mail, the day’s workload as it were, happens to be very heavy this day. But Rudi suspects that although there is of course random variation in daily mail volume, this variation is more apparent to individual mail receivers than to mail carriers. In the world of the letter carrier, Rudi believes, one day’s workload is much like the next, even to the point of maddening dullness. In fact the variation, such as it is, must be of a dull and regular sort rather than a widely varying and fluctuating sort because if it were of the latter kind, if one allowed, that is, that there could be large scale fluctuations in the daily volume of mail delivery, then one would also have to allow for the possibility that there would come a day when these fluctuations were such that no mail was delivered at all to anyone whatever. And as if this were not enough, Rudi sees that it would be necessary as well to allow that there could come a day upon which every person in the world who had a mailbox might receive thirty, fifty, or even a hundred pieces of mail, and while this is a charming thought in some ways, it would also mean that on some previous day someone would have had to send the thirty, fifty or a hundred pieces of mail, and this is simply far too many pieces altogether for Rudi to even contemplate, Rudi who, if he sends one piece of mail a month, feels that he is doing extremely well.

Rudi decides to pass quickly on to the next possibility, which is that Rudi’s letter carrier, his regular letter carrier that is, is not making deliveries today. This particular postal employee may not have come to work at all but rather have stayed home in bed with a cold, gone to the beach, broken a leg in an in-the-home accident, gone off on a binge, indulged in a day of golf, tennis or horseback riding, or taken a vacation of indeterminate length to San Diego, Palm Springs or indeed to whatever place he or she might be likely to desire to go. If this is in fact the case, it is more than probable that the Postal Service would have sent a substitute or temporary replacement carrier to take over the area thus left bereft of service. That they would fail to do so is of course an interesting possibility also and Rudi knows that there would be some who would be quick to seize on it just as there are always some who immediately seize upon the most negative interpretation of any body of evidence. Rudi, however, being, as has been said, a rational man, deems it more likely that the Postal Service is quite capable of dealing with the eventuality of one of its employees deciding to travel for an indeterminate time to San Diego and perhaps other places as well. It must not, he thinks, be such an unusual occurrence. That is, the number of vacationing postal employees in San Diego, or even Miami, on any given day, while not exactly staggering, is perhaps far from inconsequential. Rudi envisions his letter carrier, his usual sour look quite gone, happily sunning himself by the side of a swimming pool in San Diego, achieving a rich golden tan on some parts of his body normally covered by the postal uniform. Perhaps he has even covered his arms and legs with newspapers so that this tan, in the end, will be an even one on his return—but no, that is absurd. More likely he is merely relaxing at poolside and not impossibly he has become acquainted with other vacationing letter carriers, from Portland perhaps, or Pennsylvania. Yes, the air is warm, the water is cool and the company genial. He may be lying quietly or may be trading favorite anecdotes about vicious dogs or ill-behaved children, and perhaps even the limited and repetitive nature of mail volume variation will receive its share of attention. Yes, Rudi is quite sure that his letter carrier suffers no qualms about temporarily leaving his route for he too is confident that a replacement will be assigned.

The difficulty of course is that this replacement will very likely be unfamiliar with the route and consequently somewhat slower than the regular carrier, no matter what the volume of mail. Almost everyone, Rudi imagines, must be aware of how slowly things go when one is engaged in a new task or even in a sharp variation of an old one. He adds to this the fact the temporary carrier is likely young and inexperienced with a very short term of employment with the Postal Service, perhaps less than a year. Why else would he or she be merely a replacement carrier who was shuffled, more than likely, from route to route almost daily? Rudi extends his sympathy to this new letter carrier, this mere novice it might reasonably be expected, and thus accepts the lateness of the mail with calmness and equanimity.

Rudi soon realizes, however, that the ease with which he makes this acceptance is not altogether unambiguous. Being a rational man, Rudi is free to consider that perhaps like certain other prisoners in certain other prisons he secretly fears the end of his wait. Perhaps he dos not want the postman to come at all. Perhaps his longing for the postman to arrive, which is what Rudi thinks of himself as being engaged in, is in reality nothing more than a mask, one might say, for the hitherto unconsidered possibility that he is actually longing for the absolute destruction of this