Pattern recognition: it is the secret to all life . . . how the human infant recognizes his mother's face and sees safety; how a pack of wolves know each other by familiar scent; how a serial killer whose MO is predicted falls captive; how faraway military exercises captured by satellites are interpreted as the build-up to war; how whole species rise and fall in the recurring periods between ice ages; how earthquakes add miles between continents.
I looked in the bathroom mirror and did not recognize my face; the beard growing there - while accomplishing its purpose by drawing attention away from the broken nose - created a portrait of another person. Who is that man? The right side of his beard has more white hair than the left side. Odd, I thought. The visual sensation was so unusual that I could not decide if the beard made the man's face younger or older. I might as well have been a castaway from the future, wild-eyed and bearded, howling about the End of Days . . . except that I was too sleepy to imagine all that.
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