Claire and I went to a party tonight at her colleague’s apartment in Morningside Heights. We met their next-door neighbors (interesting people — he’s about to become a rabbi and she’s finishing her post-doc work at Columbia) and inevitably got to talking about where we come from, what we do, and the usual sorts of small talk. I mentioned where I went to college, and they said they knew someone who went there as well, did I know him? Turns out, I do. And as a matter of fact, he was coming over to their apartment later in the evening to have dinner with them. Small world, right?

That reminded me of something I read for school once by a French sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu, who basically said (and I’m sure I’m totally over-simplifying here) that there is no such thing as a small world. Because I am the sort of person I am, because I was born to a certain type of parents, had a certain type of upbringing, lived where I did, went to the schools I went to, like to pick my nose, and whatever else that make me uniquely me, then it naturally follows that I will be acquainted with people similar to me. People with similar interests. They in turn will have friends similar to me with similar interests as well. The circles of friends rippling out from me are actually quite small.

In other words, it’s not an accident that I happened to be at a party where I met someone who knows a friend of mine from college. No matter how happy I was to have seen an old friend, no matter how serendipitous the event might seem to me, it probably wasn’t an accident. When you play the name game, you often win. And “small world” is just a figment of our imagination.