Monkeys and their typewriters

You know that theory that says that if you have monkeys, a typewriter, and eternity, they'll type out every Shakespeare play written? (No, seriously!) Just think.... not only will they be typing out Shakespeare (not to mention hundreds of versions of each Shakespeare play, with slight spelling variations, or one word substituted for another), but they'll be typing out every Daniel Pinkwater novel, each Nancy Drew mystery, the Harry Potter series, Jane Eyre, Steinbeck, for Pete's sake! Not only every single work of literature, all historical fiction, every biography and autobiography, and, hey, smut too..... everything that ever has been and ever will be written.

Does that mean that writing is nothing more than a random combination of letters? Those monkeys could write out this entire blog, my Italy blog, anything and everything I've ever written, with as much thought to what they're writing as my pinky finger would contribute. I'm reading The Grapes of Wrath right now, and it's beautiful (I'll extoll on Steinbeck's poetic prose in another post.... but in brief, he's godly).... but is it just chance that he put those letters and spaces together in that order? I mean, nothing could have put those words together but pure genius, certainly not chance and eternity; only human thinking could put together such philosophical, complex ideas. How can random typing express philosophy, express all the ways in which we try to express our ideas? And imagine, they'd be typing up works of literature in every language that shares our alphabet, and phonetic versions of every other language.

Durr... This is driving me nuts, and I'm sure I'll start to get repetitive soon. But the work that these monkeys would produce literally is EVERY LANGUAGE, and everything that will EVER BE WRITTEN. What they could write are stories that have not even been written yet.

Tight.

posted by Holly @ 6:11 PM