To him every random arrangement of things had a distinct character, a special face, determined by, and for that very reason not determined by, something called a distribution, or by a further arrangement of distributions. Allowing himself a pun on that technical name there seemed to him a fundamental generosity in this concept. At each point of the space of the distribution an event may or may not occur, but the distribution inhabits the space in the same way, is equally at home everywhere. The distribution is indifferent to existence, yet is only expressed through the exclusion and selection embodied in existence - every particular being an instance of the distribution, and the instances part of an infinite family, indiscernible amongst themselves. He wondered if there was a future bias inherent in this idea. Was thinking of distributions a way of separating off the mysterious and irrevokable event of choosing? It was assumed that the past was unique, the cold ashes of choice, accomodating to distributions only in a formal, historical sense, "a perpetual possibility/Only in a world of speculation". Was there, he wondered, only one past that could precede this or any other present, or was the past as aleatory as the future?