Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.01

Chapter One- Ogi Formula

001

Ogi Oshino is Ogi Oshino. That is the entirety of what can be said as far as that transfer student is concerned. Once you state her name, there’s nothing left to say on the subject. You could of course make the point that everyone is someone and absolutely no one else─ultimately, that is all that should be said about any person. Tsubasa Hanekawa is Tsubasa Hanekawa, and Hitagi Senjogahara is Hitagi Senjogahara─yes, just as Koyomi Araragi is Koyomi Araragi. But even then, Ogi Oshino was just so Ogi Oshino. She was so singularly Ogi Oshino that she was nothing else. Ogi Oshino is Ogi Oshino in the same way you don’t like things you don’t like, how no means no. Any further discussion would be fruitless, utterly so. In the sense that she’s so firmly defined, so wholly decided and determined, so completely unshakable, she is extremely mathematical─yes, second only to how much she is Ogi Oshino.

Speaking of math, are you familiar with what they call the most beautiful formula in the history of mathematics? Wait, don’t even answer that, you’ll recall it once you hear it. If you ask me, forget math, I want to say it’s the most beautiful formula in human history: e^iπ + 1 = 0. Also known as Euler’s Formula. It uses e, the base of the natural logarithm, π, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, i, the unit imaginary number, then 1 and 0 all in the same graceful formula, as if it had come together by such designed necessity that if there is a God, it’d be the most convincing evidence for His existence.

What’s interesting─rather, what’s beautiful is how this formula had to exist. There’s your answer if you ever get asked that on a test. In other words, Euler’s Formula is not a product of human expression but of human excavation. Even if mankind had never existed in this world, even if there wasn’t a single brain to think about the base of the natural logarithm, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, imaginary numbers, 1, or 0, the base of the natural logarithm raised to the power of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter multiplied by the unit imaginary number added to one would have still been 0.

It’s beautiful─but when you think about it in that way, it’s also scary.

It seems that in society these days, what we call the world is a vague and hazy thing mutable and subject to being turned on its head with the greatest of ease, yesterday’s common sense becoming today’s senselessness, the rules in the morning breaking the rules at night, not one value set in stone, all of us aimless and adrift, which is why the future as a blank slate is the only thing that can give us hope─or so it seems, but really, isn’t the future, which is to say the unknown, already determined, and we just don’t know? Instead of it being the unknown, maybe we’re just uninformed?

If someone who doesn’t know the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter calculated it, the result would be pi. The theory of relativity was always there, even if Einstein never used the full powers of his brilliance. You don’t have to know who Beethoven is in order to produce the sounds of Symphony No. 5, you just have to play the notes from its score─what, you wouldn’t be as moved? In that case, just play it the same way as the version that does move you. As hard as it is to believe, likewise you don’t have to be the genius among geniuses Vincent van Gogh to come up with Sunflowers, even the rankest of novices could, simply by using the same strokes, pressure, and materials in the same environment from the same perspective to paint the same flowers. Let monkeys bash typewriters for long enough and they’ll eventually produce Shakespeare, right?

Answers don’t change─laws don’t change.

When people feel that something has “changed” or “become new,” it’s nothing more than a cute little illusion arising from the fact that a different, pre-existing program has been executed.

In that sense, there’s nothing in the world or its future that even resembles a “playful ambiguity” or “vague margin.” What exists are only hard laws that state, “Do X and Y will happen.” Just as how you don’t like things you don’t like, how no means no─not only is what’s set in stone set in stone, there is no room there to impose your will, no opening for your heart. Therefore, all expression is only excavation, all that’s devised is only discovered. No, even these discoveries may only be rediscoveries─even the impossible task that continues to torment me as I desperately seek its solution might have a ready-made model answer, all of my trial and error nothing more than a detour on the way to arriving at it─from the perspective of someone in the know.

Someone in the know.

A monster, perhaps.

Still, Ogi Oshino, that transfer student, might offer some frank advice regarding even the beauty of Euler’s Formula.

Something like this.

“Yes, it’s beautiful─so beautiful and gorgeous that I could faint. The most beautiful part of all is the way the answer is zero. That said, I feel like there isn’t really any reason to calculate all that out if the answer is just going to be zero.”

Upon hearing this, I would think: Ogi Oshino is Ogi Oshino, and that’s all there is to say about it. Everything is zero before her, and no matter how unlike herself she may act, that act becomes so much like her─and so this is a tale about math.

Let’s do some studying.

I know some of you might put your guard up when you hear the word math, so we could break that down and say this is a story about arithmetic─or to be even more straightforward, a story about numbers. After all, this is a story whose solution is decided by the larger number─which is to say, it’s a story about majority rule.

Majority rule.

The one way to turn even something wrong into the truth.

A building-block system that seeks collusion, not happiness.

Our inequality formula, for formulating iniquity.

You could say it’s the one true human invention─as well as the ugliest formula in human history.