Coincidence is undoubtedly a debased word - too easily used to explain away what in fact we often cannot explain, writes Anthony Glavin
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung preferred the term "synchronicity", which he defines in a fascinating essay full of scarab beetles that fly out of dreams into his consulting room and large fish that manifest themselves in similarly miraculous fashion.
Admittedly, rationalist bigots will tell you the world is large enough that such coincidence is only to be expected, but try telling that to a young woman I knew once back in Boston. Recovering from a serious illness, she remarked to a companion how she felt herself "once more on solid ground" - only to have the ground give way underfoot as she spoke, tumbling her into a shallow hole beneath the footpath. Moreover, she subsequently suffered something of a relapse, before finally finding her way back on to "solid ground".
Along with Jung, novelists from Joyce to Paul Auster have paid scant allegiance to scientific principles of cause and effect, while Vladimir Nabokov suggests that coincidences are nothing less than "the living organism of the new truth".
What's more, books themselves often seem to play a part in instances of uncanny congruence. Take, for example, a short story collection by William Trevor that I posted to a friend in California more than 20 years ago. Entitled The Distant Past, its paperback cover boasted an illustration by the Irish artist Robert Ballagh, depicting the smashed photograph of a uniformed army officer which hung directly above a decidedly sinister-looking red stain in a wallpapered room.
Weeks later, I received a letter from my friend, thanking me for the Trevor stories. "Imagine my surprise, however," he wrote, "when after unwrapping the book and quickly thumbing through it, I glanced again at its jacket - only to see the bloodstain on the cover actually bleeding! For a moment I felt myself lost in some kind of twilight zone."
Glancing then at his hand, my friend spied a small paper cut on his thumb, the very wound that apparently had bled directly on to the red stain of the cover illustration. When I related the incident to Robert Ballagh a few years later, he simply said, "Surreal."
Consider, also, another friend who just last month was sitting in a consultation room at the Four Courts, waiting for his case to be called. As he stared out the window at Wellington's Monument across the river, he suddenly found himself trying to remember what mistake it was that your man's opponent had made at Waterloo. With that thought there came a knock on the door, followed by a court official who stuck in his head and asked, "Are you Mr Napoleon Kennedy?" My friend's name is not Napoleon, nor did he make the same mistake, when his case was called, of trying for a bridge too far.
Yet another novelist, the Czech Milan Kundera, argues that chance alone has something to show us, and that we should use such coincidence, "fortuities" as he calls them, to embroider and embellish our lives. Paying attention to coincidence is critical, he says - which is perhaps what another pal of mine did back on June 12th, 1980 at a concert by the band the Grateful Dead in Portland, Oregan. After thinking to himself, for whatever reason, that Fire on the Mountain seemed an odd song to include in the gig, he left the venue to find ash from Mount St Helens - which had apparently erupted as the song was playing - falling like snow in the night on the city's streets.
Around that same time a Donegal acquaintance told me of how she had visited the county library one January some years before, hoping the library might have a copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson, whose vivid depiction of 18th-century life she greatly admired, and which she intended to re-read, emulating whatever editor of the New York Times it was, she said, who re-read the biography every January.
Encountering the county librarian, my friend inquired if the library had a copy of Boswell's Johnson. The librarian gave her an astonished look of disbelief, then asked if she would call back in half-an-hour. She did as requested; and when she returned the librarian handed her a two-volume Everyman's Library edition of the Life of Johnson, saying it was hers to keep. As for his astonishment, it seems that only that morning the library had received the bequest of a large private collection of books, all still boxed in the library basement.
However, a two-volume edition of Boswell's Johnson was to be set aside - with the proviso that it be presented as a gift to the first library patron who asked for it.
It was, according to my friend, one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to her. Such serendipity supports Kundera's assertion that we are often blind to such synchronicities in our daily lives.
By turning such a blind eye to coincidence, Kundera says, we deprive ourselves "of a dimension of beauty".
And indeed there is something beautiful about the coincidence that brought a double volume of Boswell's 18th-century masterpiece to a friend's bookshelf one January in Donegal.