I’ve been thinking about numbers. Not fancy numbers—just the ones we learned as toddlers.

“One” is a word for Unity. Wholeness. Perfection. Singularity. 

Once you say “Two,” you no longer have that perfection. You have traded in Singularity for Companionship. Fellowship. Relation. One is perfect and alone. But with Two, you can do the tango.

You have sacrificed insular perfection and gained a dyadic relationship. 

But note well: Embracing duality opens the door to plurality. 

It is inevitable: As soon as you have Two, Three comes marching in behind it, with a whole host of uninvited guests in its train. There is no end to the complexity you will encounter. You need a special symbol, ⚯, just to represent the embarrassing fact that there is no end. A through Ω no longer cover it. You need ⚯ as well.

I did not invent these ideas, Dear Reader. They have been expressed so often, for so long, that we may suspect they are hardwired into the human mind.

Lao Zi, the Daoist sage, may have had such things in mind when he opened his book, Dao De Jing, as follows: 

The way which may be spoken of is not the Unchanging Way.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. 

The Nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. 

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. . . . 

The Nameless is One; as soon as you name something, you have Two. And from these two, the Nameless and the named, come tumbling the myriad of other things.

Numbers are basic to Christianity as well. Long ago, formalizing a theological framework for the newly-acceptable religion, the bishops at the Council of Nicea asserted that God is one, “the Father Almighty, Maker of all things seen and unseen.” 

But also, Jesus Christ is included, being “begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is . . . consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made, both in heaven and on earth.” 

So that’s two. 

The unique twist of this god-talk, from the first chapter of John’s gospel, is that even though God is two—the Father and the Son—yet the two are still one. Some people might call that mystical.

And, as most folks know, two was not enough. They had to make it three by including the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit—a being barely mentioned in the original version of the Nicene Creed but given more detail by the First Council of Constantinople a few decades later. So the One became the Three-in-One—a concept that has survived to this day, though never without challenge from dissenters.

I do not mention all this, Gentle Reader, to start a theology debate. I only mean to point out the power that these simple numbers—one, two, three—have, and have always had, on our thinking. 

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Soon, Your New Favorite Writer will be eighty-one years old. Now, there’s a number to conjure with. Eighty-one is nine nines. And nine is magical because it’s three threes. The Trinity trined. 

Lao Zi had eighty-one chapters in his little book. One legend says he remained in his mother’s womb for eighty-one years before emerging as a full-grown, wrinkly old philosopher. I do not say this is true. I do say the number “eighty-one” carries a potency in the human mind. 

When a person gets to be eighty-one, he will have learned a few things, if he has been paying attention. But all of them—all the myriad things—come out of those first three numbers. They come from unity, duality, and the further possibility of pluralism. 

These are depths we cannot plumb. We must be content to deal, in our various ways, with all the ten thousand details. But, doing so, we might be relieved to reflect upon occasion that all these things are just extrapolations of more basic themes. 

One, Two, Three . . .  

But may your blessings be myriad, Dear Friend.

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer