Coincidence

Last week I streamed Of Time and the City on my Netflix account. (I posted a few notes on the movie here.) The film opened with a narrator reading Shelley's "Ozymandias," which gave me a start. Just a day or two earlier, I had read a passage in Philip Roth's When She Was Good in which one of the characters was analyzing "Ozymandias" as a school assignment. The poem is well-known among the better-educated; I had barely heard of it. At any rate, I felt an odd thrill in hearing the name of a poem, obscure to me, from two different sources within a few days' span.

Last summer, quite by accident, I watched two films in a row which featured Nick Nolte and a water buffalo. (The films were Tropic Thunder and The Beautiful Country.) The coincidence was meaningless but somehow pleasing, nevertheless.

There are some people - an alarming number, really - who would insist that these events were not chance at all. They would say that the universe is speaking to me, or that God is carrying out some clever scheme. Many find comfort in this idea; if everything is like a puppet on a string, one can stop worrying and leave the future to be worked out by whatever's in control. I like the not worrying part, but if we find agency in the reappearence of "Ozymandias," we pretty much have to attribute agency to things less whimsical - things horrible, in fact. Laying the Haitian earthquake at God's feet feels like blasphemy; I'd rather tote it up to chance. Someone might say, "Aha, but Who do you think created Chance?" I'm happy to reply that I'm not smart enough to work that one out.