The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist him.

What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.

At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay. Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him. The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack. They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake it for an enemy attack.

Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying the beginning of his life in the city – thirty-five years of pure hope, spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him rise to the occasion.

At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.

The Sweet Trap of Anticipation

Yevgenia read II deserto numerous times; she even learned Italian (and perhaps married an Italian) so she could read it in the original. Yet she never had the heart to reread the painful ending.

I presented the Black Swan as the outlier, the important event that is not expected to happen. But consider the opposite: the unexpected event that you very badly want to happen. Drogo is obsessed and blinded by the possibility of an unlikely event; that rare occurrence is his raison d’etre. At thirteen, when she encountered the book, little did Yevgenia know that she would spend an entire life playing Giovanni Drogo in the antechamber of hope, waiting for the big event, sacrificing for it, and refusing intermediate steps, the consolation prizes.

She did not mind the sweet trap of anticipation: to her it was a life worth living; it was worth living in the cathartic simplicity of a single purpose. Indeed, “be careful what you wish for”: she may have been happier before the Black Swan of her success than after.

One of the attributes of a Black Swan is an asymmetry in consequences – either positive or negative. For Drogo the consequences were thirty-five years spent waiting in the antechamber of hope for just a few randomly distributed hours of glory – which he ended up missing.

When You Need the Bastiani Fortress

Note that there was no brother-in-law around in Drogo’s social network. He was lucky to have companions in his mission. He was a member of a community at the gate of the desert intently looking together at the horizon. Drogo had the advantage of an association with peers and the avoidance of social contact with others outside the community. We are local animals, interested in our immediate neighborhood – even if people far away consider us total idiots. Those homo sapiens are abstract and remote and we do not care about them because we do not run into them in elevators or make eye contact with them. Our shallowness can sometimes work for us.

It may be a banality that we need others for many things, but we need them far more than we realize, particularly for dignity and respect. Indeed, we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything extraordinary without such peer validation – but we have the freedom to choose our peers. If we look at the history of ideas, we see schools of thought occasionally forming, producing unusual work unpopular outside the school. You hear about the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, the Cynics, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Essenes, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the anarchists, the hippies, the fundamentalists. A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together – which is better than being ostracized alone.

If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

EL DESIERTO DE LOS TARTAROS

Yevgenia met Nero Tulip in the lobby of the Hotel Danieli in Venice. He was a trader who lived between London and New York. At the time, traders from London went to Venice on Friday noon during the low season, just to talk to other traders (from London).

As Yevgenia and Nero stood engaged in an effortless conversation, she noticed that her husband was looking uncomfortably at them from the bar where he sat, trying to stay focused on the pontifications of one of his childhood friends. Yevgenia realized that she was going to see a bit more of Nero.

They met again in New York, first in a clandestine way. Her husband, being a philosophy professor, had too much time on his hands, so he started paying close attention to her schedule and became clingy. The dingier he got, the more stifled Yevgenia felt, which made him even dingier. She dumped him, called her lawyer who was by then expecting to hear from her, and saw more of Nero openly.

Nero had a stiff gait since he was recovering from a helicopter crash – he gets a little too arrogant after episodes of success and starts taking uncalculated physical risks, though he remains financially hyperconservative, even paranoid. He had spent months immobile in a London hospital, hardly able to read or write, trying to resist having to watch television, teasing the nurses, and waiting for his bones to heal. He can draw the ceiling with its fourteen cracks from memory, as well as the shabby white building across the street with its sixty-three windowpanes, all in need of professional cleaning.

Nero claimed that he was comfortable in Italian when he drank, so Yevgenia gave him a copy of Il deserto. Nero did not read novels – “Novels are fun to write, not read”, he claimed. So he left the book by his bedside for a while.

Nero and Yevgenia were, in a sense, like night and day. Yevgenia went to bed at dawn, working on her manuscripts at night. Nero rose at dawn, like most traders, even on weekends. He then worked for an hour on his opus, Treatise on Probability, and never touched it again after that. He had been writing it for a decade and felt rushed to finish it only when his life was threatened. Yevgenia smoked; Nero was mindful of his health, spending at least an hour a day at the gym or in the pool. Yevgenia hung around intellectuals and bohemians; Nero often felt comfortable with street-smart traders and businessmen who had never been to college and spoke with cripplingly severe Brooklyn accents. Yevgenia never understood how a classicist and a polyglot like Nero could socialize with people like that. What was worse, she had this French Fifth Republic overt disdain for money, unless disguised by an intellectual or cultural facade, and she could hardly bear these Brooklyn fellows with thick hairy fingers and gigantic bank accounts. Nero’s post-Brooklyn friends, in turn, found her snotty. (One of the effects of prosperity has been a steady migration of streetwise people from Brooklyn to Staten Island and New Jersey.)

Nero was also elitist, unbearably so, but in a different way. He separated those who could connect the dots, Brooklyn-born or not, from those who could not, regardless of their levels of sophistication and learning.

A few months later, after he was done with Yevgenia (with inordinate relief) he opened Il deserto and was sucked into it. Yevgenia had the prescience that, like her, Nero would identify with Giovanni Drogo, the main character of Il deserto. He did.

Nero, in turn, bought cases of the English (bad) translation of the book and handed copies to anyone who said a polite hello to him, including his New York doorman who could hardly speak English, let alone read it. Nero was so enthusiastic while explaining the story that the doorman got interested and Nero had to order the Spanish translation for him, El desierto de los tartaros.

Bleed or Blowup

Let us separate the world into two categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others. In some strategies and life situations, you gamble dollars to win a succession of pennies while appearing to be winning all the time. In others, you risk a succession of pennies to win dollars. In other words, you bet either that the Black