Or is there more to it, something behind it?
A while after coming across the Kennedy-Lincoln connection, I discovered there was a fancy word for unlikely coincidence.
The word was”
synchronicity
,” and it was coined by the psychologist C. G. Jung, who, with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, published a treatise called Synchronicity:
An Acausal Connecting Principle
. That was in 1952.
Surprisingly, there is still no mention in
Encyclopaedia Britannica
that these two remarkable men, despite being treated at length individually, ever knew each other. You will search the index
in vain for any mention of synchronicity. In fact you will search pretty much the whole of scientific literature without success.
It is an unsung collaboration between one man who created some of the most fundamental terms in which we think (including
“introvert” and “extrovert,” as well as the “collective unconscious”) and another who made a vital contribution to quantum
physics, which won him the Nobel Prize.
Not exactly people in whose company you need feel embarrassed to be seen, I would have thought. Which makes the omission all
the more curious.
Twenty years ago the
Concise Oxford Dictionary
didn’t list the word either. Now it does, defining it as “The simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly
related but have no discernible connection.”
One reason for the word’s cautious emergence from the intellectual closet to which it had been consigned was Arthur Koestler’s
book
The Roots of Coincidence
, published in 1972. In it he linked the idea to developments in modern physics such as quantum indeterminacy and probability
theory, and traced it back to work done on “seriality” around the turn of the twentieth century. Seriality means things happening
in clusters. The Chinese wrote about that centuries ago, and most people have experienced this in one form or another. Why,
for example, do so many people believe that things happen in threes? (And even if they do, does it mean anything?)
The following day I made a date to have lunch with my agent downtown. It was another pleasant fall day, so I decided to walk—at
least part of the way. Somewhere on Madison and a little way below Fifty-seventh I began to feel like a need for a cup of
coffee. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I had plenty of time, so I stopped at a small cafè that I didn’t remember ever having
been in before, or for that matter ever having noticed.
I slid into the first empty booth I came across. Someone had left a newspaper in the corner and I moved it out of my way.
As I did so, I saw that it was folded open at a partially completed crossword. I don’t normally have much interest in crosswords,
but for some reason this one caught my attention, and I thought I’d try finishing it off as I drank my coffee.
Six across, I noticed, was filled in “Heartfelt.”
More hearts. The card, the cake, now this. My interest moved up a notch.
By the time I finished my coffee I’d finished the puzzle too. (It was no great intellectual feat; the paper was just one of
the tabloids.) One clue had “Playwright Shaw’s first name,” which was George, which was also my own name. Another was “No
star without one,” in five letters, which I worked out was “Agent.”
I had read somewhere that crossword puzzles (as I say, I have never been a crossword addict) are well-known sources of synchronicity.
Addicts say that they frequently find something they’ve been thinking about for days cropping up in one of the clues or as
one of the answers. That was what seemed to be happening to me. I was on my way to see my agent, and this whole chain of “false”
or “genuine” or simply “marginal” synchronicity had started when I saw a playing card, the ace of hearts, that reminded me
of yet another agent. And here I was finding my name, George, in a crossword puzzle that also contained the words “heartfelt”
and “agent.”
A man laughed loudly in another booth across the room. I turned and saw that he was sitting with his back to me and was talking
on a mobile phone. It was obvious that he was as unaware of my presence as I had been, until then, of his.
“Wow,” he said to whomever he was talking to and with absolutely no reference to me, “that’s quite a coincidence!”
When I left the cafè, I realized I’d been sitting there longer than I thought; if I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for my lunch.
I took a cab, giving the address in Little Italy where I was meeting my agent. As I rode I continued turning the morning’s
events over in my mind.
What I had was a string of coincidences that, so far as I could see, meant nothing, yet formed a pattern. But do patterns
have to mean something? Or, to put it another way, can order arise from disorder without there being any significance attached
to the process? Could so intricate a little sequence of coincidences, such as I’d just experienced, be pure fluke?
Or did such things, I asked myself, using Wordsworth’s phrase of which I’m sure Jung would have approved, point to “something
far more deeply interfused”?
It was a while before I registered the fact that my cab wasn’t moving and hadn’t been for some time. I was staring at the
same stalled vehicles all around me and a stretch of wall with a faded banner reading “Liquidation Sale.” Traffic had been
running smoothly till we reached a point just north of Penn Station, where we hit a gridlock so dense that it seemed as though
all the vehicles in it had been welded together into a sprawling, immovable mass. There was the usual amount of honking, arm-waving,
and insult-calling, all to no avail. I decided my best bet was to take the subway, so I paid off the cab and started to walk
briskly toward the nearest entrance.
At the top of the steps my mobile phone rang. I’d finally given in to progress a few months earlier and bought one. As far
as I was concerned, it was just one more thing to lose; all the same I had to admit that, when I didn’t lose it, it was sometimes
useful.
“Hello,” I said, backing up a couple of steps and moving clear of the two-way torrent of people entering and exiting the subway.
A man’s voice said, “Larry, how’s it going?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “you’ve got a wrong number. This isn’t Larry.”
The man laughed and said, “Come on, Larry, stop kidding around.”
“My name isn’t Larry,” I repeated. “You need to dial again.”
“You sure sound like him.”
“Listen,” I said, growing a touch exasperated by his insistence, “I don’t have time for this. I have to hang up now.”
I did so and carried on down the steps. I had some tokens in my pocket, so I went straight through and followed the signs
for my platform.
Another small coincidence happened on the journey. The “heart” image cropped up again. Across from my seat in the subway was
an advertisement for the American Heart Association. I began to wonder—more whimsically than anxiously—if fate was trying
to tell me something. Was I about to have some kind of romantic adventure, or a myo-cardial infarction? But I checked myself
with a smile, marveling at how fast we react to the slightest element of strangeness: at how the tiniest dislocation in the
fabric of our everyday reality can throw us into the arms of fantasy. All it takes is an all but imperceptible change in the
rhythm of things. A coincidence or two.
When I reached my destination and emerged into daylight, I still had a five-minute walk to the restaurant. I was already ten
minutes late, but that wasn’t a disaster; my agent would be contentedly sipping his first martini and leafing through a copy
of the
Times
. Nonetheless, I hurried on as fast as I could.
I was vaguely aware that I was walking in the direction of an old movie theater, beautifully kept in its near-pristine thirties
design. I knew it well because it had recently presented an Orson Welles season. Sara was more of a film fan than me, but
I’d gone along with her to see
Kane, Amber-sons,
and
Touch of Evil
, all in what the publicity boasted as “sparkling new prints.”
The marquee reached out over the sidewalk, all red-and-white glass with silver-and-black trimmings. I glanced up at it, not
really interested in what was showing, but what I saw stopped me in my tracks.
Facing me on the side of the marquee were two words, arranged as follows:
LARRY
HART
People pushed past me in both directions as I stood there. Patterns kept racing through my brain but refused to make sense.
All morning I had been seeing images of “heart” as well as the printed word itself. Now here it was once again spelled as
a surname, the name of my parents’ mysterious friends, Jeffrey and “Larry” Hart. And “Larry” was who the man on the phone
had wanted to talk to. Now this.
As I stared up at the name, I became aware of a man on a ladder that brought him level with it. I continued to watch in fascination
as he reached for the “T” of “HART,” then the “R,” and handed them down to a colleague on the ground. In a moment all the
letters had been removed and that side of the marquee was blank; obviously there was a change of program that day.
I walked on underneath the canopy and out the far side. There I stopped to look back to see if the name “Larry Hart” was repeated
on that side.
What I saw was this:
LARRY PARKS
GINGER ROGERS in “THE JOLSON STORY”
in “ROXIE HART”
As I watched, the two men dragged their ladder over from the far side and began dismantling these words too, starting on the
outside and working in.
I was, frankly, beginning to feel just a little bit odd. I went on my way quickly, anxious suddenly—and irrationally—to reach
the comforting familiarity of the restaurant that I knew so well and the reassuring company of my agent and old friend.
But my mind was buzzing with questions and possible answers. The first one was whether somebody could be playing a joke on
me. But I didn’t see how that was possible.
So what was going on?
Was
something going on?
I remembered reading somewhere a theory that just by thinking about synchronicity you can make strange coincidences start
happening around you. I suppose I could believe it up to a point, but only in the sense that you might be more aware than
usual of things that could be interpreted as coincidences.
But even if the theory was true in a literal sense, it didn’t explain anything. Attracting coincidences just by thinking about
them was perhaps even more extraordinary than simply having them come at you out of the blue.
Anyway, there was no escaping the fact that since I had started thinking even half-seriously about coincidence and the theory
of synchronicity odd little coincidences had started happening to me.
At the very least I could enjoy the comfortable thought that my next book was taking shape with gratifying ease and speed.
Maybe (the eternally optimistic dream of every writer) this one would write itself.
M
y agent, Lou Bennett, was getting on in years and set in his ways. He’d always kept his office in Little Italy, indifferent
to the tides of fashion that came in and went around him, and protected by a tenancy agreement that he said he’d have been
a fool to give up just to move to a grander address, even though he was one of the most respected elder statesmen of his profession.
His habits included eating lunch in the same family-run Italian restaurant every day. If any of his clients wanted to see
him, or if a publisher felt like worrying out the small print of a deal in a more leisurely fashion than by phone, then it
was up to them to make the trek to Dino’s near Broome and Mott. Most of them were happy to do it, partly for the privilege
as well as the pleasure of being in business with Lou, partly for the food, which was just about the best to be found anywhere
outside of the tiny village in Tuscany where the family who owned the place came from.
“I talked with Mike this morning,” he said. “He thinks it’s too close to your last one.”
I had told Lou on the phone that I was thinking of writing about coincidence and suggested he run the idea by Mike Babcock,
who was the managing editor of my publishers. I was surprised to hear he wasn’t more enthusiastic.
“It’s nothing like my last one,” I protested. My last book had been about superstition and how often it was rooted in scientific
and historical fact. “I can see why he might think there’s a connection, but this is really about something else. Anyway,
I’m writing this book whether Mike likes the idea or not. Let me just tell you what’s happened to me over the last few days.”
Lou listened to my story with an air of indulgent skepticism. “Sure,” he said, “you’re right, I know. Weird stuff happens.”
There was the hint of a smile at the corner of his eyes. I knew he didn’t entirely believe me. “Let’s have a grappa,” he said,
signaling the elderly maitre d’.
I started to protest, but he waved my objections aside. “Listen,” he said, “you’re not going to work this afternoon, so what
the hell—have a proper lunch.”
It was true: The afternoon, after lunch with Lou, was invariably shot so far as work was concerned. Lou beamed broadly as
the old dust-covered bottle was produced. He had a double, but I drew the line at a single. I don’t think I’ve ever known
anyone who could drink as much as Lou and yet continue to function efficiently throughout a long day. He must have been almost
seventy, but had a constitution of toughness I’m not sure they make anymore.
“The point is,” I said, sitting back and letting the warmth of the liquor spread agreeably through my being, “there isn’t
anybody alive who hasn’t had some kind of strange coincidence happen to them at some time, and maybe more than one. It’s a
universal experience. How about you, for instance? Surely some unlikely coincidence must have happened to you at least once
in your life.”
His eyebrows twitched up a notch. “To me? Jesus, nothing happens to me. I’m just an agent. A second grappa after lunch is
as exciting as my life gets.”