Jane Morrice
I had a long chat this week with Jane Morrice, one of our Northern Irish members. We spoke about all manner of things but we also spoke about coincidences, and the meaning of these. Jane, a former journalist, kindly shared with me a written account of an extraordinary set of coincidences that she had experienced. I recounted to her one or two similar sequences that I had experienced. Indeed, so strongly did I feel about these experiences at the time that I was thinking of trying to bring out an edited collection of such accounts. That was before Paul Auster published his (disappointing, to my mind) The Red Notebook (1995). Jane’s account is so beautifully written that it has reawoken the idea in me. What makes these accounts so interesting is, first of all, that there is not one coincidence but several. Secondly, the persons concerned effectively make the chain of coincidences ‘work’ by following on from one to another where maybe somebody else would not have made associations or gone any further. Third, there are perceived meanings to these coincidence sequences or, at the least, we read meanings into them. In my own case, for example, I was instrumental, through a series of coincidences, in bringing a Canadian family back into contact with the grave of their aviator brother, who had died during the Second World War. Until I came along, the exact whereabouts of his grave had been unknown, but I couldn’t have known that. The meaning of all this, I later realised, was that I had never visited my late brother’s grave since his burial. By bringing other siblings back together I was then able to rediscover my own brother’s grave and hence confront all of the grief that had been salted away. If any of you out there have stories about significant sequences of coincidences, I’d be glad to hear about them. They are a profoundly human experience.
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