The Anomaly

Victor Miesel always carries around a red Lego block. The original brick was part of a castle Victor was building with his father, who died before it was completed. Victor keeps the brick to honor his father and their unfinished work. It is significant that the object chosen to symbolize the ostensibly unique bond between Miesel and his father is a Lego brick: a nondescript, mass-produced object designed to be interchangeable with millions of identical counterparts, something as far from the concept of a unique and irreplaceable human soul as it’s possible to get. During his life, Victor has lost the brick twice; both times, he purchased a new brick and continued to treat it as if it were the original. The object’s physical connection to his father is severed, but it retains meaning for him as the “memory of a memory” (21). The Lego brick recalls the famous “ship of Theseus” thought experiment, used by philosophers for centuries to illustrate the paradox of consistent identity over time: According to Plutarch, Theseus’s ship was preserved for posterity by replacing rotten planks with new ones, so that eventually none of the original planks remained.