Coincidence
Coincidences underpin reality. They are the touchstones of fate, places where narratives begin or break down, symptoms of pre-destination or randomness, depending on how you interpret them.
When one considers the fragile foundation of coincidences on which all hopes, dreams, tastes, friendships, feuds, loves, despairs, etc. are built, one wonders whether anything in reality is substantial, or whether we are simply putting on masks and walking onto stages that no-one, when asked, actually understands.
The coincidence of birth was the big one: your parents mixed fluids at a certain time giving rise to one sperm over another, one egg over another, resulting in you. The coincidence of where and when you were raised gave you politics, tastes, aspirations, loves, hates, culture.
The coincidence of others, who happened to be alive and in the same geography, gave you relations: friends, enemies, rivals, lovers, peers. I owe the meeting of a good friend to a chance encounter in a Sussex pub in the year 2006. My parents and I had just moved into a certain village. They could have chosen another village, but no, they chose that one, because a certain house happened to be on sale there. What would life be without this precarious sequence of coincidences? What voids would I hold inside me, unaware?
Despite its absolute prevalence, the idea of coincidence tends to sit awkwardly among us. We like to think we’re agents of free will, not the end-results of hidden forces. Capitalism commands us to develop a certain lifestyle and consume, pick a role in the overbooked theatres of society (I’m a tailor, actor, poet, banker etc.) But do the end-results stem from the essence of a personality or coincidence?
Raymond Chandler said thrilling stories could be based around one coincidence, but not two. Amateur authors are usually shot down if their plots depend on too many stars aligning for them to make sense. Paul Auster has spent a lifetime examining the relation between coincidence and fate (perhaps the two words are synonymous), using titles such as “The Music of Chance” to emphasise his obsession.
Chaos Theorists define coincidence as a “sensitivity to initial conditions” - otherwise known as the butterfly effect - in which minute differences produce hugely divergent, unpredictable results.
While reality is built on the foundations of coincidence, there is a limit to our acceptance of them. A story that breaks Raymond Chandler’s rule to the extreme is a clear example of how too many of a certain type of coincidence pushes us into the hazy territory of the irreal, the insane, and the impossible. The story goes like this. A man wakes up, eats breakfast, leaves his flat. In the communal stairwell he meets an old school friend who has happened to move in next door. Then he bumps into a neighbour, who is wearing exactly the same suit with exactly the same coffee stain on the lapel. In his letterbox is a letter not addressed to him, but the name feels familiar, and yes, it is the old violin teacher whose grandfather once fought beside his own grandfather in World War II, though he never knew this because both grandfathers tragically died from the same rare heart condition on the day the war ended. In the newsagent, the man asks for a random lottery ticket, the man provides him with one, and it happens to be the telephone number of his ex-girlfriend, who rings him, at that precise moment, to tell him she’s just bought a randomly generated lottery ticket that turned out to have his telephone number on it. Both tickets win their respective lotteries. Etc. Etc. Now the question is, how much coincidence can a person take before their sense of reality completely unravels? How long before our protagonist goes raving down the street? Or would he shrug them off, show that smug human trait of adaptability, normalise the “excessive” coincidences, as we normalise the “ordinary” coincidences that underpin reality?