Clockmaker v. Clown

The Clockmaker explains the Clerk's peculiar problem to the Clown. The Clown seems less interested in the Clerk's problem than his own. Having collected a massive bouquet of wild flowers on the long walk from the town, sneezing more and more the closer he reached the field, he has no place to put them after death.

Suppose you live, says the Clockmaker.

Then I can hold them, answers the Clown, sniffling. But if I die, he says after loud sneeze, they'll all fall with me and scatter and wilt.

The Clockmaker sees no use in explaining that the Clown's flowers will wilt regardless. Even if he did, it would be between a series of ever-narrowing periods of silence before sneezes. They both arm themselves and take to the field. The clown holds his flowers in one hand, pistol in the other. He sneezes.

They raise their guns, their guns go off.

Clerk v. Clockmaker

Whereas before the Clerk was obsessed with the similarities between the situation he finds himself in and the short piece he wrote several months prior, his obsession now shifts to the differences.

He's shocked to think, for example, that the situation continues beyond the outline of the situation he sketched. That's to say, that a world exists which perpetuates a repetition of the single pattern he drew. He learned from the Civil Servant that there was a duel that lead to their duel, and a duel before that, and so on, to a point beyond the memory of anyone involved in the chain of duels. From this he was able to extrapolate (being a quick witted man) a universe of duels, and from this universe of duels envision a single duel between a banker and a bank robber. One that may have mirrored his imagined duel exactly. And this unsettles him.

But what unsettles him most is the action by which his duel was resolved: by coin toss.

And the question: is that method of resolution similar or different in the duel I inhabit?

He asks the Clockmaker. The Clockmaker, a Deist in spirit, suggests the Clerk free himself from little worries and find comfort in the mechanics of a system that imitates the universe:

If we start at twelve, states the Clockmaker, we next hit one. And then at one, two. And from two, three. Eventually we rejoin twelve. Yet from within this twelve lies the division of twelve into sixty parts. We proceed along the sixty at a faster pace, and the full count of sixty is equal to one of the twelve. Beneath the sixty lie a further and faster sixty that compose one sixtieth of the sixty. And beneath this further, faster sixty a set of one hundred, which the French call one thing and we call another.

No offense intended, but how on earth could anyone find comfort in that? asks the Clerk.

As if nothing had been any more obvious, the Clockmaker answers: It repeats.

They raise their guns, their guns go off.