"...he was contemplating this string of coincidences of the sort that one finds both in second-rate detective novels and in the tritest everyday reality..."
-Andrea Camilleri, The Scent of the Night (London, 2007), FIVE, p. 61.
See Wind And Stereodrama + combox.
Now I really am trying to read Camilleri and not to blog again until tomoz.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
This bit from the second paragraph of Chapter I of A CIRCUS OF HELLS is apt: "A life which included no improbable events would be the real statistical impossibility."
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean,
The course of my life includes chance events and opportunities that I would interpret as providential if I believed in providence.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I'm glad they were so fortunate for you.
Merry Christmas! Sean
The things that made my life possible include a ship hitting an iceberg in 1912, a woman having a close call during a zeppelin raid on London in 1916, a man (barely) surviving a gas attack at Passchendaele in 1917, the man who survived the gas attack dying of pneumonia in 1938, and a young soldier making a very effectively sneaky ploy for a woman he'd just met at a dance party in 1942.
Just for starters!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! I remember you discussing those incidents from your family's history.
Merry Chrismtas! Sean
So I exist because a stumblebumb Bosnian assassin in Sarajevo in 1914 happened to mooch off to a tavern for lunch and it was exactly the one the archduke's car stalled in front of after it took a wrong turn on the way to a hospital because the driver didn't know the town well.
How many persons born after that date would have been born if the archduke's driver had known where he was going?
By about 1919, I doubt -anyone- born in our timeline would have been born in that one.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
IOW, human lives and affairs are chaotic and unpredictable. If the appalling coincidences leading to Francis Ferdinand's murder had not occurred, WE and billions of others would not have been born.
From a purely selfish POV, we could think it would be very bad, US not coming to exist. OTOH, the world might have been spared WW I and the millions who died because of it and the Marxist and Nazi tyrannies springing from it would not have perished.
Merry Christmas! Sean
Sean: the thing is, we can't -know- that would be a better world. Because other, equally unlikely things, might have happened!
Lord Salisbury, head of the British Tories/Unionists in the late 19th century, once said that the optimum foreign policy was to float gently downstream, occasionally putting out a pole to avoid something that was obviously an obstacle.
There's a good deal to be said for that approach, because it doesn't try to control the chaotic nature of human events.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have to agree, we can't know what a world without Sarajevo and everything that sprang from it, would have been like. Albeit, your own story, "A Slip in Time," gives us tantalizing glimpses into a world where Austria-Hungary survived into a future that did not seem too bad.
I agree there is much to be said for Lord Salisbury's view of how best to handle foreign affairs.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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