the thermodynamic miracle

dr manhattan: i don’t think your life’s meaningless.

laurie juspeczyk: no, well, obviously that’s what you’re going to say because anything i’m stupid enough to believe is true, and you just disagree with it and...uh...

laurie juspeczyk: you don’t?


dr manhattan: no.

laurie juspeczyk: but...listen, you’ve been saying life is meaningless, so how can...?

dr manhattan: i changed my mind.

laurie juspeczyk: but why?

dr manhattan: thermo dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. i long to observe such a thing.

and yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son, that exact daughter... until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you that emerged.
to distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood.

the thermodynamic miracle.

laurie juspeczyk: but...if me, my birth, if that’s a thermodynamic miracle...i mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!

dr manhattan: yes. anybody in the world.

but the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget...
i forget.

we gaze continually in the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

watchmen, chapter ix: the darkness of mere being. alan moore and dave gibbons.dc comics.1986-1987