I’ve
been on The Tommyknockers by Stephen
King, (I’m still on it, though) for a while now and on Wednesday, July 30th,
2013, I had tumbled through its pages and arrived at Saturday, July 30th of
whatever year the events in the story took place. That sort of incident has a
name, you know? It’s called coincidence.
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This
minor development kicked up something within. Driven by a need to blog more than
by a sense of awe from that flimsy event, I decided to do a piece on the foible
of chance events. There are some good happenstances and it’s such fun if you happen
on ‘em once in a while. Peel your eyes, look around you, and visualize just how
much of the inventions and gadgetry you glimpse would have been around in spite
of that inspiration of the goofy variety.
And
though we may not always be in a position to churn out masterpieces of the
Einstein and Picasso stock from any and every coincidence, fact remains that a
good deal of these special events have surprised eureka! out the mouth of many unsuspecting victims. Here, I give
you two examples of the entrancing power of coincidence.
“Barbary Shore,” a Norman
Mailer novel about a Russian spy living in the US turned out to be quite the
stuff of fairytales. After the writer completed his novel, US authorities
arrested a man living in the same building on a floor above Mailer’s on
allegations of being a top Russian spy. How’s that for weird?
There
is a story going the rounds about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” In the story, four characters are shipwreck survivors trapped on
a boat in the open seas for several days who, instructed by starvation,
decide
to cannibalize on the cabin boy named Richard Parker. In 1884, there was an
actual incident; a real life-imitating-art
gig that had three survivors of a shipwreck gobbling a fourth survivor, a cabin
boy named… your guess is as good as mine.
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What
do you think triggers coincidences?
Maybe,
it’s just Nature’s way of catching some fun. When it occurs sometimes, it’s a
trifle ordinary it don’t deserve a mention and then it trundles in on a wave of
mystic that makes our jaws drop to our chest. And that’s just one of the quirks
which this phenomenon sink its teeth into and leaves us hanging, legs flailing,
asking questions somehow, we know, we will never get answers to.
Keep
your pen bleeding.
Akpan
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