There’s a mannequin of actuality during which each motion you are taking, from falling in love with a selected particular person to studying this essay proper now, is dictated by a Rube Goldberg machine of occasions set into movement by the Huge Bang — a classical universe of clockwork determinism, during which there isn’t a room for alternative. There may be additionally a mannequin during which each occasion is the product of randomness and chance fluctuations — a quantum universe, during which likelihood is God’s different title.
Hovering between these two variations, haunted by the paradox of free will, is our expertise of what we name serendipity — the gladsome coincidence of two occasions, rendered significant by the emotional weight of every and the infinitesimal cosmic odds of their co-occurrence.
However these extremely inconceivable presents of likelihood are additionally rendered significant by the main focus of our consideration, by selecting to take care of these specific parts of actuality amid the myriad others swarming us on the identical time — for a way we select to concentrate renders the world what it is. The Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska captured this enchanting interaction of thoughts and actuality in her fantastic poem “Love at First Sight.” The Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and his unlikely pal Carl Jung named it synchronicity and placed it at the nexus of physics and psyche.
No matter their trigger, in such moments of dazzling coincidence we really feel that past the seeming actuality of this world lies one other, sending us indicators, hinting at the potential of the unimaginable.
That’s what Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929–July 11, 2023) explores all through his 1984 traditional The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library).
Kundera locations likelihood on the heart of the love story unfolding between two individuals who consider they’ve chosen one another. Teresa — a romantic filled with existential longing and Anna Karenina — is working as a waitress in a restaurant. One night, a person seems up from his e book to order a cognac. At that very second, Beethoven comes on the radio. Way back a string quartet had come to play in Tereza’s small city and had rendered Beethoven “her picture of the world on the opposite facet, the world she yearned for.” She takes it as an indication — Tomas should be the reply to her craving. She goes on looking for different indicators — when he prices the cognac to his room, she realizes his room quantity is similar as the road variety of the home she grew up in. “Tomas appeared to Tereza within the lodge restaurant as likelihood within the absolute,” Kundera writes as he considers the psychological equipment of how we imbue such coincidences with which means:
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be extra exact, with the unintentional conferences of individuals and occasions we name coincidences. “Co-incidence” implies that two occasions unexpectedly occur on the identical time, they meet: Tomas seems within the lodge restaurant on the identical time the radio is enjoying Beethoven. We don’t even discover the nice majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied as an alternative by the native butcher, Tereza by no means would have observed the radio was enjoying Beethoven… However her nascent love infected her sense of magnificence, and she or he would always remember that music. At any time when she heard it, she could be touched. Every part occurring round her at that second could be haloed by the music and tackle its magnificence.
In serendipity, we discover an organizing precept for which means amid the randomness that governs the universe of which our personal lives are however an echo. It’s the music amid the noise of being. Kundera writes:
Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his sense of magnificence, a person transforms a fortuitous prevalence… right into a motif, which then assumes a everlasting place within the composition of the person’s life… With out realizing it, the person composes his life in accordance with the legal guidelines of magnificence even in instances of nice misery.
It is necessary, Kundera argues, to be awake to serendipity — for letting coincidences go unnoticed deprives our lives of “a dimension of magnificence.” However his very metaphor undermines the case for pure likelihood because the conductor of our lives: Music, in any case, shouldn’t be the product of likelihood however of the composer’s deliberate alternative in sequencing the notes and silences. Our expertise of magnificence is the product of the standard of consideration we select to pay an object. Simone de Beauvoir, writing in the identical period as Kundera, got here nearer to the composite reality when she contemplated how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.
Nonetheless, Kundera captures an elemental reality: We could select to like whom we love, however it’s likelihood that first intersects our fates. Coincidences remind us that likelihood is probably not the only conductor of our lives, however it’s what offers life the capability for shock, for sudden deviation from the expected path — these quickenings of the soul that elevate life above mere existence and envelop it in an aura of magic that makes it price dwelling. He writes:
Probability and likelihood alone has a message for us. Every part that happens out of necessity, every little thing anticipated, repeated day in and day trip, is mute.
[…]
Necessity is aware of no magic system — they’re all left to likelihood.
Complement with Iris Murdoch on love and chance and a Borges-lensed meditation on chance, the universe, and what makes us who we are, then revisit Kundera on the central ambivalences of life and love and the key to great storytelling.
