“You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.” – John Barth
Before it was known as Sri Lanka, the island off the southern coast of India, was called Serendip which was derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpa meaning Dwelling Place of Lions Island. It is therefore somewhat surprisingly to learn that there have not been lions on Sri Lanka since the Pleistocene. But the inhabitants of Sri Lanka are known as the Lion Blood People and thus the island is as well.
An English nobleman, notable mainly due to his prolific letter writing, coined the word serendipity based on the Persian fairy tale “Three Princes of Serendip”, in which the three protagonists navigate a series of (mis)adventures through a combination of sagacity and chance. I had to look sagacity up, so I will save you a search, it basically means perceptive and wise with keen discernment.
In the story random stuff happens, the princes observe it, draw conclusions and act – thus getting themselves into and out of jams in non-linear ways. The problems are weird, the solutions are weird, but the alchemical milieu of the journey – life – is magical.
Sort of like a night out in college in the 90s where you randomly run into your roommate in the bathroom of a club (foam party!), the two of you catch a ride with some upperclassman to the waffle house, where you are seated in the smoking section next to a group of girls from your sociology class and end up watching the sun rise from the hot tub at their apartment complex while listening to Outkast’s new album ATLiens. Naked obviously.
Oddly specific right? You probably would also not be surprised to learn it took me 8 years to get my undergraduate degree. And I would not change a thing. Back to the story.
Greetings earthlings….The rise of the algorithm is correlated with the waning of serendipity through the erosion of both chance and, with AI, sagacity. You talk about Gillian Flynn near an Amazon Echo speaker, you get targeted with adds for Tara French and Ruth Ware on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Google. It’s a self-replicating maze of mirrors, where you are both the Minotaur and Theseus in want of a clew, with temptation to seek counsel of AI oracles and bypass your cognitive wetware all together.
And so hoping, like Icarus to fight gravity, I simultaneously plummeted to the ground and looked to the heavens as I challenged Claude to help me increase the randomness and serendipity in my life. Here is the strategy that we (royal?) collectively came up with: I would submit a random “seed” number (drawn from a receipt, a random scrap of paper or some other modern equivalent to reading the entrails of a chicken) to Claude daily and he would use this seed to generate a truly random quest.
The first such quest was to”[g]o to the nearest secondhand store you’ve never had a reason to enter — thrift, estate resale, junk shop, whatever’s closest. Starting from the door, count 48 items. Buy that one. If it’s over $20 or not for sale, keep counting and take the next thing under $20.”
So with prompt in hand – like a tablet from the mountain – my wife Jen and I stopped into a random thrift store on the way to meet our friends for dinner. The reality of how to practically “count” items in a room overflowing with junk is more difficult in practice than it is in theory. Do you count every single thing? If so, in which direction do you move? How do you impose order on a fundamentally non-linear arrangement of phantasmic ephemera from the lives (or deaths) of others?
The irony of looking for the spark of life in the fossils of the lives of others was not lost on us. Then again, this computer runs on crystals and dinosaur bones, so maybe the mystics and the engineers have more in common than they like to admit. Like Mateo Mcconaughey famously said sometime after his ecstasy fueled dream of floating naked in the Amazon river while wrapped in pythons and anacondas: “Sometimes you got to go back to go forward.”
Following some discussion we decided to alternate counting interesting items while moving counterclockwise through the store. And so we moved, searching in a haunted house mumbling numbers. We counted a painting of a campfire, a taxidermy deer head with a tobacco pipe, a concrete owl statute, and a basket backpack. Sometimes interesting things were right next to each other. Other times we would walk for 10 minutes without finding anything interesting.
When we broke 40 you could feel the vibe shift – we were getting close. At 47 we had completed our walk through of the store. Somewhat let down we started to walk across the lobby to start at the beginning again (which in my head felt like shopping after browsing) when Jen said “48” and pointed to a nook near the cash register.
It was a 1940 Smith Corona Super Speed typewriter, the same typewriter on which Frank Herbert wrote Dune. The tag read “Needs Refurbishment”.
