I do not believe in miracles, not in interventions where some divinity suspends the laws of nature temporarily satisfy my want or need. Nor do I believe in fate? I do not believe some future-making mechanism is determining my life. Life is a complexity of interrelating and interfering objects and events. A roll of the dice. Things happen. The dice are not weighted in our favor or against us. We do not live in a magical world, although at times it might seem that way. Yesterday was one of those times.
I have been looking for a certain book in our local used book store for several years. The Book of Disquietude by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) It is a rare book of difficult beauty, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith. Two days ago, I did what I often do in the store, scanned the ‘P’ section of the shelf for Pessoa not expecting to find the book. Once again, I did not find the book. Today, driving past the bookstore, I went in on a whim. I had just been there. What are the chances of there being something new? Again, scanning the ‘P’ section, looking at an array of vertical alphabet letters spelling out authors and titles, my eyes filled with the name PESSOA. My mind filled with disbelief. I stared at the book that was not there two days ago. The Book of Disquietude.
Now, you are probably saying to yourself, big deal. So, you found the book. If you look long enough you can find a needle in a haystack. But there is one detail missing from my literary tale. This morning I received an email from a friend telling me she was reading Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude and asked if I had read it. This morning the answer I sent back to her was no. Tomorrow morning it will be yes.
The Book of Disquietude is a journal of Pessoa’s Walter Mitty* life. But Pessoa is no ordinary Walter Mitty. Like James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, Pessoa is a mild-mannered man with a dull boring life. But unlike Thurber’s Mitty, Pessoa does not lose his nondescript life in exhilarating fictional fantasies. Rather, Pessoa is a man of penetrating insight. He pays exquisite attention to seemingly insignificant things; a walk down the street, coffee in a café, the approach of a thunder storm, seeing his face in a photograph, children bounding down a sidewalk after school. Since most of daily life is composed of seemingly insignificant things, learning from a man who transforms the ordinary into deep beauty and meaning is a useful expenditure of time.
I do not believe in fate or miracles. I do believe in paying attention. My belief system causes me to think there is no causal correlation between the arrival of the email and the appearance of the book. Coincidence is a perfectly rational answer, one I readily believe to be true. Yet, these two apparently separate incidents, the email and the book, even though I believe they are not causally related, the email did not cause the arrival of the book, they are experientially related. Carl Jung* calls this synchronicity. The incidents happened in close enough proximity that I felt a relationship between them, even believing there was none. The magic of the world is revealed when we consistently pay attention.
There is an old saying, often attributed to the Buddha: “When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.” Perhaps we should add: When the reader is ready, the book appears.
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“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is a short story written by James Thurber and first published in the New Yorker on October 18, 1939. It was published in Thurber’s short story collection My World and Welcome To It in 1942.
Carl Jung (1875 -1961) Swiss psychologist, proponent of archetypal psychology and the concept of the collect unconscious.