The View From Serendip

The importance of coincidence has always played a role in how I approach this blog. One newspaper item connects with a book or a film—or some other conjunction of media and/or events—and leads to musings that make their way into an essay that falls under the overall concerns of The Farm.

Serendipity is a kind of coincidence, but one with generally favorable connotations. The term comes from the old name for Ceylon (the colonial name for today’s Sri Lanka), and was (according to the OED) coined by Horace Walpole based on a fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.” According to Walpole, the heroes “were always making discoveries by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” Hence, its definition as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.” The title of the post is stolen brazenly from Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Sri Lanka for most of his life (from 1956 until he died in 2008). He published The View From Serendip in 1977, in which he collected assorted essays, memoirs, and speculations.

As recently as 2014, an essay from the book was quoted by Michael Belfiore in his opinion piece for The Guardian, “When robots take our jobs, humans will be the new 1%. Here’s how to fight back.” But even though I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the jobs our current president wants to “bring back” (like coal mining) and why it doesn’t make any sense to do so (in light of what the future probably holds, and the fact that a lot of these jobs kill people—especially when that same president wants to get rid of as much regulation as possible)—this doesn’t even count as one of the occasions that prompted this post. Nevertheless, I should note that Clarke’s predictions often turned out to come true, and the book is well worth reading.

The real impetus for writing came from two directions.  The first arrived in one of my feeds (Medium), and I sent it to my Pocket list for future reference: How to Turn Wikipedia Into a Bottomless Pit of Story Ideas. What intrigued me about the article is that it advocates using Wikipedia the way I used to use library reference indices, by looking “around” various topics, noticing adjacent topics that frequently led to unexpected enrichment of potential source material. As research became more and more focused on digital sources (especially search engines), I often reflected on the loss of that kind of serendipitous encounter, until I realized that Google often afforded similar opportunities. The author of the article (“Moonlighting Writer” for Student Voices) provides a number of tips for using Wikipedia's features for more than just a quick look-up.

This might be a good place to point out that Wikipedia's description of "The Three Princes of Serendip" (linked above) focuses on the princes' education in the arts and sciences, and how they use that education in their adventures.

The next event arrived completely out of left field when my phone lit up with the name of a former student, one of whom I’d been thinking recently but hadn’t heard from for some time. I’d forgotten that she’s on my phone's contact list, else I’d probably have texted her before now. But she was driving through the neighborhood and decided to call me. Since we’d last spoken, she’d gone to grad school to earn a master’s in art education after discovering that working in the gaming industry wasn’t really what she wanted to do. And now she’s teaching high school, thinking about getting a PhD and also about starting a family—at just about the same age I was when I started out on similar path(s).

At the very moment I received her call, I had been wondering what to do with several years’ worth of Archaeology magazines, and realizing that if I wanted to donate them to a school, I’d have to sort through and arrange them by year, and bundle them accordingly—at least a day’s worth of slog.  But as my student and I were talking I connected “art teacher” and “archaeology magazines” and popped the question: Do you have any use for these? And indeed she did. So we got to enjoy a nice catch-up conversation, and I got to unload a slew of old periodicals and art-related stuff I’d been saving for who knows what. And I didn't have to sort through them because they'll be used for mixed media art projects.

In the end, it was particularly rewarding to realize that I don’t really need to abandon hope just because we’ve got an anti-intellectual in the White House, who has no regard for the arts or the sciences. There are young folk out there who have learned to love learning, and have decided to act on their curiosity and creativity and share it with yet another generation or two. One can only imagine what one of her students might do when he or she connects one event with another in the history of archaeology, or juxtaposes one culture’s artistic input with that of another. The possibilities are limited only by their imaginations, which I hope haven't been too stunted by the current cultural climate.

Image note: Mrs. Peel during one of her evening sojourns in the back yard, with serendipitous sunset back-lighting.

Passing Strange, and Wonderful

Desdemona’s lovely speech in act 1 of Othello, in which she describes how she fell for the guy in the first place, recounts the enormous power of storytelling. Great stories make us love people, and help us love ourselves. My version of the passage is stolen from the title of Yi-Fu Tuan’s book on aesthetics, nature, and culture (for which he paraphrases Desdemona's lines) and he’s a bard of a different kind: one of the best philosophers still alive. But I use it for a different reason: to mark the deaths of two remarkable storytellers, each of whom has profoundly affected my reading life, and (in many ways) the way I think about the world. The trouble with getting old oneself, of course, is that those older than you are, who have inspired or otherwise nurtured you, start dying off and reminding you over and over again of your own mortality. Still, one would hardly want to have done without them—one’s own personal heroes, inspirations, role models.

The first of these is Arthur C. Clarke, almost every book of whose I’ve read one or more times in my life. He epitomized the scientist-science fiction writers I admire most—those who can use what they know about how the universe works to posit truths about those who populate it. Although he lived to be ninety years old and wrote more than most people could in several lifetimes, I will miss him sorely. My memorial offering: two good obituaries (one from the New York Times, and one from Space.com) and Clarke himself via YouTube, from an interview last December.

The second is Robert Fagles, emeritus professor of Classics at Princeton, translator extraordinaire, channeler of Homer and (more recently) Virgil, and someone who could read Greek iambic hexameter aloud with the voice of an angel. His versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid should be on the required lists of all English-speaking schools in the world. Through them children would learn about honor, loyalty, and the frailties of humankind, and about both the glory and the folly of conflict. Having worked on my own translation of the Odyssey (in order to keep up my Greek chops) for the last twenty five years, I can attest to the difficulty of rendering Homer’s transcendent language into equivalently powerful English, but Fagles did it with both of Homer’s works. He translated plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus into resonant commentaries on the nature of tragedy. And then he blessed us, only two years ago, with the best translation of the Aeneid I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many). The last time my husband and I drove from Texas to California, we listened to Fagles's translation of the Odyssey, read by Ian McKellan, and it transformed the landscape of the trip. Robert Fagles died last week at only 74. Here’s a nice obit in the New York Times, and a wonderful audio recording of a talk on Homer at Princeton.

Both of these men helped color my view of utopia: Clarke with his apparently irrepressible belief in the positive outcome of human exploration, especially into space, and Fagels with his eloquent translation of Homer's Odyssey, and particularly the story of the Phaeacians. My heartfelt thanks to them both, for their many and enduring gifts.

Photos: Arthur C. Clarke by Mamyjomarash, Wikipedia Commons. Robert Fagles by Denise Applewhite, Princeton University.