August 2, 2006
Coincidences, and Days vs. Dates Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:25 PM EST I do not think I confused day and date—I considered them sequentially—but Mr. Gordon is surely right about the vastly lesser probability of the day and date of death coinciding. In re CEOs named Charles E. Wilson, I wrote that when you consider other factors, “the odds drop a bit,” which I still think is true. I think Mr. Gordon perhaps overestimates the psychological import of a semicentennial, but if I understand him correctly, he does not assign any meaning to this sort of coincidence; he is simply pleased by what he takes to be a fluke.
This continues to puzzle me. Insofar as flukes happen and must happen, I simply do not understand why people are so diverted by them, and I suspect that most people who are greatly struck by this sort of thing at least tacitly assign some sort of meaning to the coincidences. I do think that people who want to find significance in striking coincidences have a sad and distressing tendency to find that meaning; Mr. Gordon, who seems to read a lot of nineteenth-century fiction, will probably recall a disturbing and brutally funny scene in War and Peace where Pierre Bezukhov massages numbers until he finds the meaning he is looking for. I do not mean to imply that Mr. Gordon does any such thing, but again, I do not quite understand why genuine coincidence, understood as such, greatly diverts anyone. The fault is probably my own.
Now that I think of it, a coincidence did at least once divert me. At college, the toughest-looking woman on campus asked on a single occasion if she could sit in on an otherwise invariably all-male nightly poker game. Her first hand, in five stud, was a straight flush to the queen of spades. But I think this diverted me because I was amused by the temptation to ascribe meaning to a meaningless event. I may come by this prejudice genetically. My father was once in a foxhole in the Ardennes, about to be overrun by tanks, when the other man in the fox hole began to pray his rosary. My father suggested that the fellow drop the rosary and pick up his rifle, and was rebuffed with the not unpersuasive reply that the rifle was no likelier to be of assistance than the rosary. To my father’s gratified astonishment, the tanks then veered off, probably attracted by a more inviting target, but I remember my father remarking that his joy in not being overrun was tempered by his irritation at the prospect of his never hearing the end of this coincidence. He was spared that, as the other fellow was either killed or wounded soon after. To the end of his life, my father was understandably struck by a few such coincidences, i.e., ones that had affected him personally, but he meticulously refused to assign them metaphysical significance of any kind. It was one of the many things I admired about him.
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