The autobiography that takes forever to write
Tristram Shandy is writing his autobiography, but he writes so slowly that it takes him a whole year to record the events of his very first day. If he were mortal, he would fall hopelessly behind. But what if he lived forever? Philosopher Bertrand Russell used this to illustrate a quirk of infinity: because the set of days and the set of years are both infinitely large, Shandy would eventually write down every single day of his life.
The Slowest Biographer in Literature
In the eighteenth-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, the narrator sets out with the ambitious goal of recording every detail of his life. However, Shandy quickly runs into a catastrophic logistical hurdle. His storytelling is so meticulous, digressive, and burdened with detail that spending an entire year writing only yields enough material to cover the events of his very first day of existence.
From the perspective of ordinary life, this predicament is absurdly hopeless. Every single year that passes adds only twenty-four hours of documented life to the manuscript, while simultaneously creating another 364 or 365 days of lived experience that remain unwritten. Rather than catching up with his subject matter, the author falls exponentially further behind with every passing moment, guaranteeing that the autobiography will remain perpetually unfinished before mortality intervenes.
Russell and the Infinite Extension
More than a century after Sterne published his comic novel, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell revisited Shandy's dilemma in his 1903 work The Principles of Mathematics. Russell posed a simple yet profound question: what would happen to this hopelessly delayed autobiography if Tristram Shandy were granted immortality and lived through an infinite sequence of years?
Our ordinary mortal intuition suggests that the problem would only get worse. If living for one hundred years leaves an author ninety-nine years behind, living for an eternity should seemingly create an infinitely insurmountable mountain of unwritten days. Yet Russell arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion rooted in the emerging mathematics of infinity: if Shandy lives forever, no day of his life will remain unwritten, and every single event will eventually find its place on the page.