Serendipitometer Register: #1

Griselda has gone home for the night, and I am toiling late in the office, researching the monastic origins of the pattern of Robert Owen's New Lanark regimen, and separately, the provenance of a monocle purported to have been Tycho Brahe's.

Having just consulted several articles on JSTOR some minutes ago, the computer is on, casting its eldritch glow upon the manuscripts and instruments on the desk before me. To rest my mind I checked a news site, hoping for some distraction from my dizzying labors and from the melancholy pangs of my recent grief (Griselda's gone, so I can speak of it openly, though I'll hear about it in the morning.) which were becoming especially acute in the lateness of the night and the boredom of investigatory drudgery; I explicitly thought of how bad the boredom was, and brought to mind the wise advice of Robert Burton regarding its avoidance. At that very moment I idly clicked Refresh, only half-awarely hoping that some news would break which might rally my thoughts. Nothing of that sort: but the banner ad changed, and there was a message from the Ford Motor Company, with the words BOREDOM HURTS. Upon which I applied myself with revived passion to the question of the monocle.

On the Serendipitometer, that reads as a 4.3. And yesterday morning, I was greeting a inquirer downstairs at the storefront. He was puzzled by the stuffed crocodile suspended from our ceiling, and we engaged in small talk of primordial rivers and man-eating reptiles. But all the while, I was thinking of Nick Hornby's famous novel of masculine metanoia, to which I've lately had occasion to return. Then a young woman marched in and asked, "Have you got a signed first edition of High Fidelity, owned by seventeen people, fifteen in succession, two at once, three of whom were redheaded, and which has saved at least one romance from final destruction and crossed the equator twice? " I fell back into the chair laughing. At the coincidence with respect to the title, not at the request: of course we had such a book.

And later that day, I was thinking I ought to revisit Love Actually, that charmingly hopeful- but not wholly unrealistic- reflection on the simplicities and complications of love, which never fails to lift my spirits, despite its (forgivable) spells of wooden acting and contrived dialogue. I was recalling one scene in particular, when I got a call from two old friends (who also happen to be my neighbors), organic gardeners by trade, informing me that they were assembling a large party of friends and neighbors to watch that very film in a few hours, with fine popcorn for all (yes, popcorn comes in degrees of fineness: but ordinary popcorn is fine too), good Belgian, and very exotic finger foods. Now, I may be a philosopher and a cosmopolitan merchant of the subtlest discrimination, but few things please me as much as crowding happily into an enormous couch with fifteen friends and neighbors in order to sit back, eat better than good popcorn, and devoutly contemplate the mysteries of affinity and affection. So I accepted with alacrity.

Three synchronicities, of course, but we'll count them as a set. The readings were 4.3, 5.1, and 7.