I was reading Fire Down Below by William Golding. It is an account of a voyage to Australia. Set in the 19th century, I think. Then, even as I was halfway through the book, I happened to pick another one to read. It gripped me immediately, and I continued reading it after I finished the first one. The Far Country by Nevil Shute. This one is a story about settlers in Australia, set in the early part of the second half of the 20th century. They might well have been descendants of the voyagers in the first book. Uncanny. I have read about 15 pages of The Far Country. It is small, tightly set type, and its 239 pages may well reveal more unsettling secrets. I do not believe that coincidences are happenstances. They have meaning, but their significance escapes our overly rational and cynical minds. I have already made a further, remarkable discovery. Both these titles have three words and thirteen letters. I’m sure of it, I spent a long time counting them.
Another time, I was reading another book, I think it was The Hitchhiker’s Guide…, there was a place in the book when the hero looks at the clock, and the clock says 1.03 am. I stopped reading, yawned, glanced at my phone. The time…was actually 1.04 am. It could have been 1.03 am at the same moment it was 1.03 am in the book, and then, in the time it took for me to put down the book and glance at the clock, the minute hand could have moved on. Out of kindness for me, just so I was slightly less spooked than I could have been.
The other day I opened a book on my Kindle and read ‘And delight reigned. They drew the chair under the plum tree, which was snow-white with blossoms and musical with bees.’ This was in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. And then I took a bite out of a plum. It is not often I eat a plum. I would have eaten perhaps twenty plums in all my life until the day of this coincident. And to read about a plum tree at the very moment I was eating a plum is very rum. It is worth noting.
A little later, I read this in The Canon, The Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier: ‘John Littlewood (mathematician at the University of Cambride) blah blah blah: “You see and hear things happening at the rate of maybe one per second, amounting to 30,000 or so ‘events’ a day, or a million per month. The vast majority of events you barely notice, but every so often, from the great stream of happenings, you are treated to a marvel: the pianist at the bar starts playing a song that you’d just been thinking of, or you pass the window of a pawnshop and see the heirloom ring that had been stolen from your apartment eighteen months ago. Yes, life is full of miracles, minor, major, middling C. It’s called ‘not being in a persistent vegetative state’ and having a life span longer than a click beetle’s.”
This is incredible isn’t it? I mean, reading something about coincidences, so soon after a fantastic coincidence. What are the odds of that?