(4 of 4)
Baseball's Branch Rickey once offered a serviceable definition: "Luck is the residue of design." To be sure, luck obeys the laws of a spooky kind of antiphysics, but it responds to risk and reflexes. To some extent, it is true that people make their own luck. Given a lucky chance at the story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward ran hard. Good luck must have room to occur. It can be encouraged, even though its exact mechanics remain perverse and mysterious. For its part, bad luck is so eventually inevitable that it is almost a sin to be surprised by it.
"The older I grow," Philosopher Sidney Hook wrote a few years ago, "the more impressed I am with the role of luck or chance in life." The world's distribution of wealth, he pointed out, depends almost as much on luck as on energy, foresight and skill. It is only the luck of the world if one is born in the country club district of Kansas City instead of the Sahel or Bangladesh. It is the sad luck of things for a Colorado oil millionaire if his youngest child, by mishaps of the psyche, turns out to harbor some fetid, lovesick ambition to kill the President.
Surely the ultimate purpose of luck, if there is one at all, is to offer such a spectacle that men and women, besides being vastly entertained, come to recognize their common vulnerability to luck's weird and endlessly inventive impulses. Hook thinks that chastening drama might make people more charitable toward one another. Well—if we are lucky. But perhaps luck, good and bad, also has a deeper physiological purpose, programmed into the human animal in the first dawn of his intelligence: to keep the adrenaline flowing, maybe, and the brain alert to the world's epic of apprehension, terror, greed and hope. Perhaps luck is the way that life puts history into bas-relief, and differentiates moments, and people: the way that the universe punctuates time.
—By Lance Morrow