on bizarre coincidences

One more post tonight, though, because it was triggered by an incident on the Paris Metro this evening.

Everyone is familiar with the role that chance and coincidence can play in a biography. You sit in the only open seat on a streetcar and meet the love of your life. You randomly turn to a page in a random book and discover your vocation. You happen to sit next to someone on the first day of the semester and become best friends for years to come.

The first thing that usually happens when this topic comes up is that the discussion becomes polarized between those who feel that such things “are meant to happen,” and the critical intellectuals who find reasons why it was purely statistical chance. I tend to think that the latter attitude is disproportionately dominant among Western intellectuals; we really know very little about the deeper connections between people, places, and things. But I would tend to employ “subnatural” rather than supernatural explanations for many of these events. More on that some other time.

In any case, I have had an unusually large number of strange coincidences in my life. Let’s start with a couple of minor ones— minor because they had somewhat plausible explanations that I won’t waste your time by elaborating:

*At a house party in Warsaw this weekend, I ran into someone I knew from Egypt, completely unexpectedly. There are perfectly good reasons for this one, but it was still a little strange.

*I was once on the same trans-Atlantic flight as Bruno Latour, completely unexpectedly. But again, there were pretty good reasons for this one that made it something less than a major shock.

On to the slightly more weird, an incident I’ve described on this blog before…

*April 2003, my first trip to India. I travel to Ladakh in the eastern part of the state of Kashmir, in the Indian Himalayas. I choose a hotel. The winter ends late in Ladakh since the snows melt late, so I am literally the first guest at the hotel in 2003. The lobby of the hotel is under seasonal renovation, so the owner brings the guest book straight to my room for me to sign, and leaves for a few minutes. I decide to flip through and see where the other guests are from. Immediately, I discover that the final guest of 2002 (i.e., the last guest before me) was “Alphonso F. Lingis, USA.”

One might explain this one away too. Lingis and I are both phenomenology people from the American Midwest. We both have travel tastes that run towards the exotic. It’s not surprising that we would both think of going to the Himalayas on a trip to India, and Leh is not a bad choice of town if that’s your goal. We would both naturally tend to avoid any ultra-touristic place, but we’re both also advanced in age past the “backpacker hotel” bargain-seeking phase. Take all this into account, and it’s not so odd that Lingis and I might end up gravitating toward the same 50-100 or so hotels in the nation of India.

Nonetheless, it’s still a bit weird that we were back-to-back guests at an obscure Himalayan hotel, he as the last guest of 2002 and I as the first of 2003.

*The weirdest coincidence of my life is surely a bizarre four-way link in the early 1990’s involving me, my roommate in Pennsylvania, my roommate in Leipzig, and my cousin’s girlfriend in New York. It would take too long to explain. There was nothing scandalous about the story, it was just a bit too involved to be worth explaining here.

But now, on to the relevant coincidence of the moment…

*On a cool October evening in 1995, I was sitting with my friend Irene at the Java House in Iowa City. A young gentleman walked up to our table and said: “Excuse me, but I think I know both of you.” And he did! He knew me from Annapolis, Maryland and he knew Irene from Austin, Texas. Neither of us had ever mentioned his name to the other; he was at best a casual friend of both of us.

Here too, you could explain this one away a bit. All three of us are American academic or para-academic types, and Austin and Iowa City are two of the mainstays of the American college town circuit. Lots of people have lived in both Austin and Iowa City, and even more have visited both at some point. Annapolis is the slight oddity, but St. John’s College graduates usually do go onto the other circuit, and so the combination of places wasn’t all that strange.

But still— if for him to run into one of us in Iowa City would not be that bizarre, running into both of us simultaneously, unaware that either of us knew the other?

The point of the story is that I ran into this same guy tonight while I happened to be getting onto a car of the Metro Number 10 line at Odéon, and he happened to be getting off of the exact same car. We’ve been out of contact for 10 years through yet another series of coincidences, so there will be plenty of news to exchange.