The pleasure he took in demonstrations of randomness, in the fringes surrounding and separated the readily identified contents of the shared world. For example the patterns in the materials of clothing, simple patterns which break up into not quite regular configurations when looked at closely, patterns in skin and in bodies, spatial patterns never quite perfect instances of a type, pointillist fields. This breakdown of ideal form had once been taken to signal the terminal effects of the essential formlessness of matter on divine emanations, but now the mathematics of the universe was revealed precisely in the evanescent regularities of chance effects. And then there was the perception of randomness in time, splashing water, the flickering of a flame, the sounds of cars passing in the street, the complex play of predictability and innovation in music. He saw randomness as an essential component of beauty, and somewhat at odds with the beauty's centripetal insistence on its own integrity. The randomness hinted at an underlying freedom, more generous, more surrendered, more ecstatic than beauty itself.