Beyond Coincidence (5 page)

Within the world of fiction, this classic doppelgänger scenario features in Dostoevsky's
The Double,
Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
and a number of other works. Dr. Brugger speculates that some authors who have used this particular dramatic device may themselves have been suffering from Doppelgänger Syndrome and writing from experience.

Coincidence has been an engine of literature for centuries, its exponents including no lesser wordsmiths than Shakespeare and Dickens—who seldom hesitated to introduce extraordinary chance events to keep their plots bubbling along.

Dickens'
A Tale of Two Cities,
for example, revolves around successive coincidences, that feuding central characters Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay look alike, resulting in Carton going to the guillotine in Darnay's place, and that Darnay, who marries the heroine, Lucie Manette, happens to be the nephew of the marquis who had her father imprisoned.

Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
is packed with coincidence. Viola believes her twin brother Sebastian has died. To protect herself in a strange country, Viola pretends that she's a boy—Cesario. But in her boys' clothes she looks just like Sebastian, and when he turns up with his new friend Antonio, everyone thinks that he is Cesario. The beautiful Countess Olivia has fallen in love with Cesario (not realizing
he
is Viola) while Cesario has been taking messages of love from Duke Orsino to Olivia. Eventually all is resolved in a happy, if somewhat coincidence-packed, ending.

Writer and literary critic John Walsh believes
Macbeth
to be the Shakespearean play that makes the most interesting use of coincidence. Macbeth is assured by the three witches that he should fear no man born of woman … and certainly not before Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. So no worries there for Macbeth. Unfortunately it transpires that his adversary Macduff was born by caesarean section. Macduff's soldiers then creep up on Macbeth at Dunsinane by using the branches of the trees of Birnam Wood as camouflage.

Says John Walsh, “I imagine Macbeth turning away, smacking his forehead with the palm of his hand and saying, ‘How unlikely a coincidence is this?!' Just before his head is severed by Macduff.”

It has been said of Charlotte Brontë's somewhat romantic plot developments in
Jane Eyre
that she “stretched the long arm of coincidence to the point of dislocation.” The same could be said of countless writers over the centuries. Not that this has made them any less successful. Quite the contrary.

Coincidence is more sparingly used in contemporary fiction. The more sophisticated modern reader can be left feeling short-changed or even cheated by its overuse. Not that this much inhibited James Redfield, author of
The Celestine Prophecy.
Despite its modest literary credibility, the book became a number-one bestseller around the world. Its plot revolves around the search for the “nine key insights to life itself.” The first insight, it transpires, occurs when we become “fully conscious of the coincidences in our lives.” This turns out to be little more than the justification for one of the most unconvincing, coincidence-laden plots ever conceived. Still, the book-buying public of the world can't be wrong. Our love of coincidence knows no bounds.

American author Paul Auster is an enthusiastic modern advocate of coincidence as a structural or narrative device. He says, “We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. People who do not like my work say the connections seem too arbitrary. But that is how life is.”

And that's how it was for British crime writer Ian Rankin—author of the Inspector Rebus crime novels—when he was invited to contribute to an obituary of novelist Anthony Powell who had just died. Powell was the author of the twelve-volume epic,
A Dance to the Music of Time,
which is packed with coincidence and synchronicity—school friends bump into one another after forty years; somebody will be thinking about a painting just before being introduced to the artist.

Rankin had been introduced to the books by a friend at university who gave him the first three volumes as a birthday gift. Powell's death prompted him to start reading the books again. He took the first couple of volumes with him on a trip to Harrogate for the annual conference of the Crime Writers' Association.

“Coincidence,” he says, “has dogged my writing career.” He published a novel about a “magic circle” of judges and lawyers, only to have the police in Edinburgh investigate a similar claim two years later. A year later, sitting in the south of France, he dreamed up a story idea about an alleged war criminal living quietly in Edinburgh, only to find that Scottish Television was making a documentary about a real war criminal living in the city.

“More recently, I encountered a gentleman with the surname Rebus who lives in Edinburgh's Rankin Drive, and a police officer with the exact same job title and surname as another character in one of my books.”

At the Harrogate conference one speaker showed a slide of a truck that had lost control and smashed into the bedroom of a bungalow. The owner of the bungalow was sick that day and confined to bed. But the telephone had roused him from bed seconds before the truck toppled a wall onto the spot where he had been. The telephone call had been a wrong number.

Rankin returned home on the Sunday evening and collapsed onto the sofa, reaching for the TV remote. As he channelsurfed, he saw a face he recognized. It was one of the contestants on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
“It was Alistair, an old friend—and he'd just won $225,000.”

It wasn't until Rankin was going to bed that he placed the final piece into the coincidence jigsaw. He remembered what else his friend had done. Years earlier, when they had been at university together, Alistair had given him a birthday present of three Anthony Powell books.…

So why do we love coincidence? Is it because we are intuitively celebrating what Arthur Koestler called a universal principle that “things like to happen together”?

Perhaps coincidence is fundamental to the human condition. We crave and need the patterns and rhythms and symmetry it provides. It brings respite from disorder. And perhaps our brains are hard-wired to both seek out and create synchronicity. We absolutely need doppelgängers and parallel universes in which alternative versions of ourselves live—only more successfully, of course.

Mathematician Ian Stewart has studied coincidence. His scientist's view of why we love it is more prosaic. “Well, it gives us great stories to tell at the bar,” he says.

3

IT'S A SMALL WORLD—COINCIDENCE AND CULTURE

The oldest observed and most enchanting coincidence of nature has led wise men and children a merry dance down the ages to many and various inventive explanations. It is the fact that the Sun and the Moon appear equal in size in our sky. We know now it's all a matter of perspective, but that's only because clever people have told us so.

The first clever people had very little reliable knowledge to build upon. The 6th-century-BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus estimated the Sun to be a foot in diameter. This would have made its distance from Earth around forty-four yards. It's easy to say now, with the help of five minutes' research on the Internet, that Heraclitus was wrong. We can even give him the figures: the Sun is 830,247 miles across, compared with 2085 miles for the Moon. The Sun's diameter is four hundred times larger than the Moon's. The Sun is also four hundred times farther away from us than the Moon. It is this relative distance that makes the two bodies equal in size in our perception.

Given the apparent randomness of the cosmos and the vast distances involved, it is a truly remarkable coincidence that from our unique perspective the Sun and the Moon should appear the same. But coincidence is all it is, however potent the Sun and Moon's symbolism in our lives and folklore as a complementary pair of equal opposites.

What was magical in the past, however, doesn't necessarily hold the same mystery for us now. On the other hand we are not immune to magical interpretations of newly perceived coincidences. In fact the evidence suggests that our tendency to opt for paranormal explanations is increasing. One reason is that we experience a lot more coincidences than people did in the past, and the frequency multiplies every year.

Our ancestors lived in smaller communities than ours, traveled less frequently, less far, and were exposed to a narrower range of experiences. Opportunities for unlikely correlations in their lives were more limited. They made the most of those that came their way, often investing them with profound significance.

Ostensibly the modern world is less superstitious, yet it is also a place in which seeming magic is more likely to happen. It's a busy and bewildering place, growing ever busier and more bewildering. Within the last hundred years human society has accommodated several dynamic technological revolutions, each of which has transformed the pace and scope of individual experience. We now have mass mobility, mass communication, and mass access to computing power; and we have that inexhaustible information regurgitator, the Internet.

The solemn maxim “know thyself,” written above the temple of the Ancient Greek oracle at Delphi, may be—as it ever was—more honored in the breach than in the observance, but now at least we seem to know everything else. There are billions of items of computer-sorted information at everybody's fingertips, broadening our view but not necessarily our understanding.

Profligacy of information makes the possibility of coincidence more likely. The statistician's law of large numbers states that if the sample is very large even extremely unlikely things become likely. Well, the sample base we expose ourselves to every time we travel abroad or log on to the Internet is vast. “It's a small world!” we exclaim, as the correlations come together. One thing is certain: the wider the World Wide Web, the smaller the world. Today we are wired for coincidence.

But while our experience of coincidence has increased, our knowledge of probability hasn't kept pace. Most of us have a better grasp of elementary mathematics than did the average American colonist, but the sheer volume and complexity of our experience of coincidence makes it harder than ever to sort out the fantastic from the mathematically feasible.

That's why the most consistent factor of reported coincidences is the insistence by their observers that they aren't coincidences at all. They are brought about by angels, or magic, or sock goblins, or space aliens playing around with the postal services—anything but simple chance.

The problem is, chance isn't simple. You need to know a fair bit of mathematics to be able to work out probabilities. Scientists and bookies do it inside their cool heads but most of the rest of us are dismayed by the arithmetical effort and rely instead on intuition, which is demonstrably bad at estimating probability. Human beings are very easily impressed. What seems utterly unlikely to a human being often turns out to be extremely probable in the cosmic scheme of things. Think Sun and Moon.

Or think Bible codes. According to some ancient accounts, the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, which is said to have been dictated by God himself, contains codes that if deciphered will reveal many other messages for mankind. It has long been a respectable pursuit for scholars belonging to remote and dusty religious orders to attempt to detect hidden patterns therein, discounting the spaces and punctuation in the text and treating the letters as a regular matrix. Inevitably, given the number of letters the Bible contains, and the fact that written Hebrew contains no vowels, many coincidental word patterns have manifested themselves in these searches, to which significant meaning has been attributed.

Computer science, far from making this arcane procedure seem even more eccentric, kicked the whole code detection business into a different league by increasing the speed and the variety of ways in which the letter matrix could be analyzed. Words could be identified running forward, backward, vertically, and diagonally in the text. Using a procedure called equivalent letter spacing it could also find words consisting of letters that were not adjacent, but were spread out in the text, each letter separated by the same number of nonrelevant letters. Computer searches carried out by the prominent Israeli mathematician Professor Eliyahu Rips discovered incredible examples of conceptually related words adjacent to each other in the text, such as the names and birthplaces of famous rabbis. The discovery of the name of the murdered Israeli president Yitzhak Rabin next to a reference to death and a vertical “Kennedy” running through the phrase “assassin that will assassinate” seemed to suggest a prophetic quality.

Skeptics were slow to counter the claims of the researchers and Michael Drosnin's book about the phenomenon,
The Bible Code,
sold millions. Even today it seems few things excite us more than the prospect of proof of the paranormal. It took time for other teams of statisticians to find conceptual flaws in Professor Rips's painstakingly rigorous experiments. Meanwhile Brendan McKay, professor of computer science at the Australian National University, used Rips's system to find prophetic correlations of death and murdered presidents in
Moby-Dick.
In the end the Bible codes merely demonstrated that given enough letters, coincidental word patterns will emerge, and that many of them, given a little interpretation and a great deal of excitement, will appear to have meaning.

In 1967, sociologist Stanley Milgram predicted that there were only six degrees of separation between any two people on the planet. The idea entered dinner party folklore, but few people realized that Milgram's attempts to prove it were unsuccessful. Recently, however, another sociologist, Duncan J. Watts, successfully proved a similar proposition. Watts assigned sixty thousand people a target person, possibly living in a different country and certainly from a different walk of life, and instructed them to attempt to pass an e-mail message to that person by forwarding it only to someone they knew, with a request to forward it on in the same way. On average it took between five and seven e-mails to hit the target.