Great Pan is Dead. Eric D. Lehman
My Encounters with Coincidence
by Eric D. Lehman
Little Bound Books Essay Series
Little Bound Books
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The author has tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from his memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances he has changed the names of individuals and places, he may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations, and places of residence.
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Fiction
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The Foundation of Summer
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When I was twenty-eight I joined my parents and grandparents on a tour of Italy and Greece. On our second day in Rome, my family shuffled eagerly in the morning sun, waiting to see the fabled Sistine Chapel. I had examined histories, guide books, and The Agony and the Ecstasy. I was ready to see what the imagination of Michelangelo had done for civilization: put a real human face on an unknowable and distant God.
After waiting in the street only briefly, the tour guide rushed us past long lines, up a huge flight of stairs, and into the fortress of the Vatican. We slowed down a little, swallowing the appetizer of a long sculpture gallery. Then, the tour group hurried down stairs and around a corner. At the entrance, the smiling guide told us to take our time in the Chapel itself. I’m not sure if our tour operators bribed the guards or if the hour we were given was a common time limit, but most other tourists I observed were hustled through the barn-shaped temple fairly quickly. My family and the rest of our group were not. We stared at Michelangelo’s ceiling, walking around in circles or sitting on the benches along the walls, heads craned to the painted sky. I tried to absorb the subtleties that make this one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time.
And then I saw him, mingling with the crowd: God. Or close enough. Standing and looking up at the Renaissance masterpiece next to someone I presume was his son, was John DeLancie, the actor from Star Trek who played “Q,” the omnipotent god-like figure from that fictional universe. I rushed over to my mother and pointed him out. She recognized him, too, not from this iconic role but from the soap opera Days of Our Lives, and urged me to go up to him and say something. But I didn’t want to bother him; he was on vacation with his own family and surely didn’t want the praises of some stranger.
So, after a few minutes, he passed through the gates and into the rest of the Vatican. I continued wandering aimlessly about the Chapel, gazing at the centerpiece, Michelangelo’s version of the Almighty reaching out to touch Adam. In this undeniably holy place, I had just had my own encounter with a fictional deity of sorts, a wonderful blending of ancient and modern, of complex and pedestrian art. It was also another in a long string of coincidences that seems to have accompanied my life.
I am not alone in experiencing such startling coincidences, and my awareness of them traces back to a book I encountered in third grade. It’s a familiar story—while on a quest, a strange little man was separated from his companions, left alone in a deep cave system. He stumbled around in the dark, feeling his way. And then, his hand fell upon a small circular object lying on the tunnel floor. A ring. A magic ring. A remarkable chance that allowed him to escape murder by the ring’s previous owner, and allowed him to transform from a pipe-smoking, self-indulgent fellow into a genuine hero.
In the series’ next book, we find out that the ring was in fact a ring of power, actually the Ring of Power. This chance encounter was an even greater chance than we had suspected. Or was it? The wise old wizard speculated that the little man was “meant to find the Ring.” That seemed to indicate a greater purpose to this event, and as the wizard said, “that may be an encouraging thought.” But the author smartly did not go further than that. The key seemed to be that there was uncertainty about it. It was neither random chance nor definite fate, but something in between: coincidence.
Over the years I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings dozens of times, and got a lot out of them, including a desire to write my own books. But for some reason, I kept returning to the coincidental event of finding the ring. The Oxford English Dictionary on my parents’ bookshelf defined coincidence in part as a “remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” The key word for me was “apparent”—it implied that there could indeed be a hidden meaning, a hidden purpose. If something has a known cause, like why the sky is blue, it is not suggestive of personal meaning. If it is pure chance it is also without significance. But if it is somewhere in-between? Ah, then we have an interesting case, an unknown cause.
Because the cause, if there is a cause, is unknown you can try to puzzle out a meaning. Just as people find meaning in certain symbols, formulas, or secret codes, I looked for it in “concurrences of events.” They were evidence of something hidden, sign posts to a greater purpose. They meant something on their own, and they pointed to a greater meaning.
I don’t think I was the only child to think this way. On Christmas Eve, you hear a sound on the rooftop. Santa Claus? Against all probability, you bump into a neighbor in a faraway city. Have you just brushed up against a cosmic connection? You buy a book at a used book store, and only later realize that the nameplate in front shows it once belonged to your grandfather. A secret knowledge lives in-between those pages. Coincidences might be glimpses of the inner workings of the universe. In my own naïve, hopeful way, I set out to discover them.
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