Faces

I have a theory. Is it possible that there are only a finite number of faces? And that these n number of faces are recycled again and again? I mean, I know that sons can look like their fathers (I know all three of mine will look just like theirs), and daughters like mothers, but what about beyond that?

There’s a saying that everyone has a double, and maybe that’s just a glitch in the space-time continuum. Perhaps each face is only supposed to exist once at a time, but sometimes, accidentally, two people in the world at the same time have the same face. This, of course, does not include twins. Those, by definition, must exist at the same time, although perhaps part of the definition is that that particular face then does not exist in a different time.

The Earth is finite, to that I believe we can all agree. The environmentalists in this world (and hopefully most others) realize that the resources provided by this planet, while quite plentiful, cannot last forever. I wonder, for example, what the consequences are of creating a void inside the earth from pumping or drilling out its natural resources. What fills the holes left behind where the oil used to be?

But I digress. The water we drink today is the same water drunk by Cleopatra, Shah Jahan, and Genghis Khan. If you followed a particular droplet of water through its lifetime of liquid-gas-solid, cloud-rainfall-lake-slushie-sweat, the same droplet will have passed through countless people over countless generations. The same droplet that was inside a rain cloud during the Great Flood in Chicago could also have participated in the tsunami a few years back in Asia.

So why can the same not be said of faces. Statistically speaking, given two eyes, two ears, a nose, mouth, cheeks, forehead and chin, and five different face shapes (round, oblong, heart, square, and diamond), the number of distinct permutations of faces is absolute (I believe the equation would be “n choose k” and would probably take ears out of the equation since they’re on the “outside” and don’t really make two people look significantly different from someone else with every other feature identical). So if I wanted to do the math, I’d figure out the probability equation for the distinct number of types of each feature (eyes: round, almond-shaped, close-set, deep-set, narrow-set, wide-set; lips: full, narrow, wide, etc.) and could calculate the total number of faces that could possibly exist. If that number is greater than the number of people that have ever existed or will ever exist, then my theory would obviously be proven wrong. But if, as I suspect, the number of people in existence over all the years of human existence exceeds this mathematical figure, then clearly my theory has some validity.

In 2000, a group of friends (including myself) went to Italy for vacation. While there, in Florence, I stayed in a room featuring the art of Botticelli, and one picture was of a woman (the woman just right of center, wearing a garland) from his Primavera painting. I wondered about the woman who posed for that painting. She was obviously someone who lived in Botticelli’s time (1445-1510), but she could just as likely be someone living today.

The Girl With A Pearl Earring (Vermeer) looked somewhat like Scarlett Johanssen, or at least enough like her. Although, when I looked at the picture, I thought she looked more like Anne Heche. But anyhow, back in the days of the great artists, people lived in small communities. Their circle of acquaintances was not very large. Artists painted a face, and the face belonged to one person. And the time of the painting is given away by the clothes being worn (clearly, an expert could tell the exact age of a painting, but the lay person would look at a painting and, if the painting were done today, would say that subject was in costume).

But now, we are exposed to so many more people, so many more faces. Through television, world travel, and the Internet, we are familiar with far more faces and people than ever before. So we can see when two people – in our own time – seem to resemble each other. I think people seek comfort in the familiar, and like to see new faces and associate them with people they already know, even if they only know their characters in a television show. When we meet new people, we may compare them, file their images away with the association with someone familiar. For example, there’s a mom of one of my sons’ classmates that looks like the brunette from Sex and the City. My neighbor looks like Rachel Ray.

How is this possible? Clearly, there are only a certain number of faces out there, and one particular combination of features was duplicated in two distinct individuals with no shared DNA. It’s bound to happen. It’s only noticeable now because we can apply the theory to a larger subset of the human population.