Infinity, the Infinitesimal and Lightly Salted Ripple Potato Chips

There is, I hereby humbly submit, no more appropriate theatre for Pascal’s double infinity than the self-checkout lane of a large, fluorescently lit supermarket at 6:42 p.m. on a weekday. Not a cathedral. Not an observatory.

Rather, a supermarket, where the piped-in music is a faintly traumatized cover of a song that was once upbeat (think “Imagine” by Avril Lavigne or “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” by Jessica Simpson), and the Bartlett pears are individually stickered as if for identification in a police lineup. (No corporate grocery store anywhere in the world will ever play Nancy White’s epic lament titled “Stickers on Fruit”). But back to Blaise Pascal. Load your offers. Scan for our app: Though sadly not the founder of the much-missed 20th century chain of Quebec and Ontario hardware stores that bore his surname, he did gain some lasting renown in the 39 years allotted to his life in 17th century France as a mathematician, physicist, philosopher and Christian theologian.

Pascal was also the inventor of a sophisticated adding machine (the Pascaline) two centuries before Charles Babbage devised his unrealized plans for a mechanical calculator (the Analytical Engine) that served as the prototype for modern computers. He was also — trumpets, please — the first person in recorded history to wear a wristwatch! Blaise Pascal was the original TikTok influencer.

If you’re into pressure gauges, and who isn’t, you’ll know that the name “pascal” (abbreviated as Pa) was internationally adopted by the 14th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1971 in recognition of the great man’s contributions to hydrodynamics and hydrostatics.

One pascal is the pressure exerted by a force of one newton perpendicularly upon an area of one square metre. This isn’t very pushy, so you’re more likely to hear of kilopascals (1,000 Pa) when measuring tire pressure or megapascals (1,000,000 Pa) when assessing material tensile strength, as we often do in the privacy of our own water closets.

But for those of us who don’t work for Canadian Tire or Environment Canada, the guy is most famous today for what is known as “Pascal’s wager,” which, despite the name, did not involve buying a half-price patio table with crooked legs and an intransigent umbrella stand (as I once did at a long-defunct Pascals outlet in Les Jardins Dorval). That little wager didn’t work out terribly well pour moi.

But his famous one went essentially like this: It is not possible to prove or disprove that God exists, but it’s a better bet to believe that He does and live accordingly. Why? Because if God exists and we live a moral, God-fearing life, we could be rewarded at death with eternal happiness in heaven. If God doesn’t exist, it makes no difference whether we believe in Him or not. So why not go with Door No. 1 rather than the earthly temptations Jay has on his table or the box Carol Marel points to on the floor? In the immortal words of Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance? Yeah!”

Now, if the transactional suggestion that religious belief should be based on what we might gain after we die strikes you as coldly rational and kind of missing the point, you’re not alone.

To me, a less well-known idea in Pascal’s first book on Christianity titled Pensées, which he never finished, is actually much more intriguing. Hard to believe as that may be.

In his seventy-second pensée (this guy had more deep thoughts than Jack Handey), Pascal  imagined humanity suspended between two abysses: the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small. As he rather pietistically framed it, these two extremes — today the subject matter of cosmology on the one hand and quantum physics on the other — “touch and join by going in opposite directions, and they meet in God and God alone.”

So far as Pascal was concerned, the infinitely small is even harder for humans to conceptualize than the infinitely great: “Philosophers have much oftener claimed to have reached it, (but) they have all stumbled.” What Pascal did not live to see while reaching for the celery sticks in the produce section — tragically, since it would have saved him several pensées — was the blinking supermarket screen that reads: “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA.”

Which brings me, at last, to the philosophy of groceries, where this was leading all along.

Let us begin with the infinitely large. The gargantuan warehouse-style supermarket itself (think Superstore or Costco or Maxi & Cie or Super C) is a sort of cosmos unto itself.

Miles and miles of aisles radiate outward in geometric ambition. Overhead lights blaze with the indifference of minor suns. Somewhere in the rafters, unseen ventilation systems hum like distant galaxies, circulating air that has known many sorrows. They put that $%@! on everything.

The store’s scale dwarfs the individual shopper. You enter with a list and a sense of agency; you exit having purchased three items not on the list and a vague feeling that you have been gently reorganized at the molecular level. Oh, and you just saved 37 cents on that bag of No Name stale nuts by driving the extra 10 miles beyond your local grocery store.

Now zoom out further. The supermarket is one node in a vast economic universe: supply chains that snake across continents, refrigerated trucks barrelling down interstates and Canadian highways, container ships inching across oceans. That mango in your cart might have begun its journey under a different hemisphere’s sky. The barcode on the mango is a small hymn to globalization. When the scanner beeps, it is not merely a beep. It is the audible confirmation of planetary logistics. The music of the spheres posited by Pythagoras and Aristotle. Kepler’s musica universalis. Food for thought. Mainly because of the meat. Unlock savings now.

And yet.

Zoom in.

The self-checkout screen demands that you “place item in bagging area.” You comply. The machine hesitates.

Somewhere within its circuits, electrons — those jittery, subatomic insomniacs — are making decisions. Sensors calibrate. Scales measure the infinitesimal difference between what the system expects your Cheerios box to weigh and what it actually weighs, which is apparently less than a paperclip’s worth of deviation away from ignominious public disgrace.

Here is the abyss of the infinitesimal: the gram. The fraction of a gram. The invisible smear of weight that distinguishes “valid purchase” from “suspicious activity.” You are being judged by a machine that can detect the moral significance of a slightly overenthusiastic placement of 2% fruit-on-the-bottom Greek yogurt.

Though 400 years ahead of his time, Pascal might have jumped the matchlock musket on having the two infinities meet in God and God alone. In the 21st century supermarket, the infinitely large and the infinitely small meet in a nineteen-year-old employee named Jason, who wears a lanyard and an expression of indecipherable fatigue. Depending on the chewy potency of his fruity cannabis gummies, Jason greets you with either a sleepy or a vaguely stupefied Yo!

And you — humanity, poised between the infinitely large and the nanoscopically small — are stuck in the middle with Yo! (I’m reminded at this point of the unnamed Hollywood starlet quoted in both The New Yorker and a New York Review of Books article several years ago as proudly kvelling: “If you really organize your time, it’s almost infinitesimal what you can accomplish.” The New Yorker’s tart two-word retort: “We know.”)

Jason (remember him?) has the authority to override the machine. He is the mediator between the cosmic scale of global commerce and the subatomic crisis of your kale bunch. If the infinitely large is the supply chain and the infinitesimally small is the weight discrepancy of 0.03 ounces, Jason is the point of convergence. Jason alone can press the sacred button that restores order. He is the Alpha-Bit and the omega.

Sorry, but it’s difficult not to get sacerdotal about this.

Meanwhile, you stand there — finite, blinking, clutching a reusable bag that has “SAVE THE WHALES” printed on it in fading ink. You are poised between immensities. On one side: the incomprehensible vastness of a market economy capable of delivering Chilean sea bass to a landlocked suburb. On the other: the microscopic precision of a scale that suspects you of attempting to smuggle a shallot.

The middle position is excruciating. You are too small to comprehend the macroeconomics of seafood distribution and too large to meaningfully intervene in the circuitry of the scanner. You are, in effect, a carbon-based adapter between barcode and bag. You must perform the ritual correctly. Scan. Beep. Place. Pause. Hope. If you’re feeling particularly devout, you can even fill out the “How did we do today?” survey later to offer valuable customer feedback. (Or to make the same lasting mark on corporate thinking, you could just scrunch up your receipt and pascal-power it through the paper-only trash slot on the way out. The paper-only trash slot with the ham sandwich from the deli wedged partway through.)

Ah. But what if you’ve forgotten the “SAVE THE WHALES” cloth bag?

Now we arrive at the true abyss. Abandon hope all ye who enter barcodes here.

Cleanup on Aisle 5.

Forgetting the bag is the supermarket’s original sin. Not theft. Not price-gouging. The bag.

Because suddenly the entire cosmic drama contracts into a single, humiliating question:

“Would you like to purchase a reusable bag for 99 cents?”

This is not a question. This is a moral referendum.

You, who stood moments ago as mediator between global radish logistics and subatomic soy-based discrepancies, are now revealed as someone who — despite owning approximately seventeen reusable bags at home, one of which might even be in the trunk of your car at this very moment — has failed to bring one inside.

The infinitely large reasserts itself. Oceans choked with plastic. Ice caps thinning with quiet dignity. Galápagos giant tortoises. Always the bloody tortoises. Endless Planet Earth documentaries narrated by Sir David Attenborough exist to remind you of the stakes. (He’ll turn 100 in May, by the way. Maybe his mother was a frigging tortoise.)

The infinitesimally small also tightens its grip. Ninety-nine cents. The faint crinkle of a single-use bag. The microscopic thickness of polyethylene. The barely perceptible nod buzzed but judgmental Jason gives you as he reaches for the stack.

And there you stand, balanced between planetary guilt and the undeniable fact that you now possess more items than can be carried in two arms without risking a citrus avalanche.

This is where Pascal’s double infinity becomes aggressively domestic. The vastness of environmental consequence collides with the triviality of human forgetfulness. The globe and the gram meet in the thin handle of a bag that will either disintegrate in five seconds like a Mission: Impossible tape or endure until the sun expands into a red giant.

You consider your options.

1. Purchase the reusable bag, adding to the hoard at home, where reusable bags reproduce in darkness like famous Attenboroughs.

   
   

2. Decline the bag and attempt to carry everything at once, performing a kind of secular Stations of the Cross across the parking lot.

   
   

3. Ask Jason for mercy, which he cannot grant, because Jason is not the convergence point of infinities today; he is simply gnarly and wasted, dude.
   

In this moment, you are fully human. Finite. Fallible. Slightly overburdened.

And perhaps that’s the quiet grace of it. We do not conquer the infinitely large or the infinitesimally small. We negotiate with them. We forget the bag. We buy another one. We tell ourselves we’ll remember next time. The cosmos continues expanding; the sea of fluctuating quark-antiquark pairs continue to thrum like waves upon a tropical shore; the milk continues sweating gently inside a bag we did not plan to acquire.

If Pascal were here, he might say the infinities meet in God.

If Jason were here — and he is — he in fact does say, “Paper or plastic?”

And you, suspended between galaxies and grocery carts, must answer. Or at least you would have, until remembering that plastic bags were banned five years ago. Jason is regressing to  2011, when he was four and last felt safe. (See time dilation; coming right up.)

For occasionally the checkout system freezes, and in that suspended moment you can feel the abyss on both sides. The line behind you lengthens — a social infinity of mild irritation that everyone behind you in line automatically assumes is your fault.

Time dilates (told you). The overhead lights hum with elephantine levity and astronomical indifference. The screen blinks. The Magic Boomerang has been thrown by a boy in rural Australia (remember when you used to watch episodes of this show on CBC’s Razzle Dazzle in the sixties before Dad would get home from work?). Time stops altogether.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, data travelled through cables at near-light speed to confirm the price of cilantro. But here/now in this jagged rent in the space-time fabric of the universe, you are the bottleneck in a river of commerce that began before you were born and will continue long after your loyalty card expires.

The situation in which you find yourself is similar to when the old dear in front of you is counting out exact change from her embroidered reticule and Zeno’s dichotomy paradox kicks in.

You know how that works. In order for you to advance to the till behind her, you must first travel half the distance. To travel half the distance, you must first travel a quarter of the way. Before that, an eighth, a sixteenth, a 32nd and so on. Having entered this lane that follows like a tedious argument of insidious intent, you must complete an infinite number of sub-journeys in reverse order. Which means you can never actually get started. This becomes apparent about the time you realize there are only so many times you can glance at the gleaming slippage of the newly printed magazine and National Enquirer covers bearing melancholy news about whichever Hollywood star (more or less your age) has entered his or her agonizing death spiral.

Which is also when the mommy behind you is distracted by her crying baby and her five-year-old seizes his chance to crash their heavily laden shopping cart into your heels. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs.

And yet, there is something almost heroic about your stance. You persist. You rotate the barcode 90 degrees. You lift the item, replace it more gently, as if soothing a nervous animal. You apologize to the machine, which is to say, to the invisible network of scales and servers and supply chains that constitute the modern sublime. In the pink pool of three-hour-old spilled goo on the counter, you briefly catch a reflection of the twisted rictus that your face has become. You’ve got the eyes of a strangler.

This is the aggressively mundane version of Pascal’s insight: that to be human is to hover between scales we cannot master. The infinitely large — economic systems, planetary logistics, the fact that your bananas have a geopolitical backstory. The infinitesimally small — sensor tolerances, electrical charges, the tiny adhesive strength of a produce sticker that refuses to peel cleanly.

They touch and join, going in opposite directions, in the small drama of you trying to buy toothpaste. Which is when it suddenly dawns on you, Mr. or Ms Percy Faith, that you’re humming along just a little too loudly to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” or Starship’s “We Built This City” and that the music you dug yesterday is the grocery store muzak of today. Are we human or are we trancers?

If there is divinity here, it might not be in thunder or revelation but in the quiet click of “Approve” on a touchscreen. In the reconciliation of gram and globe. In the absurd fact that a creature composed of quarks and anxieties can stand in fluorescent light and successfully exchange symbolic currency for Ramen noodles.

You finish. The receipt prints — warm, curling, faintly chemical. A thin scroll of proof that you have navigated the double infinity without triggering the security alarm. You gather your bags, finite and triumphant.

Outside, the sky stretches to infinity. Inside your bag, sesame seeds cling to the plastic window of a hamburger bun package with microscopic resolve. Above you, galaxies drift. Beneath your notice, electrons hum.

And in between — miraculously — you suddenly remember that you forgot to buy dill pickles.

Next: Exploring the hidden meaning of William Blake’s “infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour” through the medium of margarine with yellow dye buttons and potted meats from your childhood.