In praise of serendipity - a letter from Arvon’s Director

It’s early spring. The hedgerows peel away as I walk across field after field towards the broad lip of horizon beyond. There is such endless freedom in the remote Dorset countryside to cross boundaries. I have to do this once a month, or in London I become a crazed caged animal not being able to see the horizon everyday but instead being confronted by the indifference of buildings blunt with their denial of the fullness of the sky.

As I walk, I glimpse one half of a rainbow throwing its arch into a tree. The rest of the rainbow is invisible, until another arch lands three fields away. I am determined to try and trick the light so the whole rainbow will be revealed to me. So I try to change my angle, stepping out of a field lush with newborn lambs straight into the path of an oncoming car. That’s how I meet Gabriel a friend I haven’t seen for months who just happens at that particular moment, to be on that particular road, in that particular part of the countryside which is nowhere. He’s hundreds of miles away from home and about to go to Nigeria the next day. Serendipity - that’s what I think as he hugs me in the middle of this somewhere-nowhere, his wife beaming at me, and their two year old child Ben introducing me to Emily the dumper truck clutched tightly in his budding fist. Serendipity - I have been meaning to call you. Serendipity leading to the discovery that he and Sybilla have a friend who live two fields away from my father’s house. Serendipity - accidental happenings which lead to new knowledge.

In a world driven by the need to process our lives, serendipity is an endangered species It is undervalued and despised. Yet it is the triumph of the imagination and the very essence of any form of discovery. Without serendipity, Willelm Roetgen wouldn’t have discovered x rays, Henri Becquerel radioactivity, Isaac Newton gravity, Louis Daguerre photography. In science, serendipity holds a position which is inviolate but is seldom celebrated and shouted about. It threatens to throw science off its proud throne of high rationalism by introducing chance and imagination into the equation of living and discovery.

But serendipity is what art and science are all about. Just remember that moment when you write and your put two words together for the first time and they shout new meanings at you. Or think of when you pluck a random book from the shelves and you discover a new idea which feeds into your own thoughts. But with Amazon email recommendations, classes on how to be creative at the BBC, the proposal for GCSEs in creative writing, serendipity - the chance operation of the human spirit - is under threat. Society seems to be more and more driven to tame the imagination into a series of boxes
which can be ticked, to turn it into a series of processes which can be described and followed and not allow anything to chance. How wrong can we be?

In 1754 the great English eccentric who could never be boxed in, Horace Walpole, coined the term serendipity. He wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann, an Englishman living in Florence saying:

“I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right-now do you understand serendipity?”

The fairy tale is replete with accidental discoveries leading to new knowledge. The three princes from the land of Serendip - the ancient word for Sri Lanka - can’t help themselves. Everywhere they turn, something happens which leads to something else. A captive girl they stumble upon in a forest turns out to be a princess and one of them is rewarded by having her hand in marriage. They are rescued from being put to death for identifying a camel they have never seen by a traveller steps forward to say that he has just seen the missing camel wandering in the desert. And so the King Bharam Gur doesn’t put them to death and they are given lavish rewards.

Randomness has its own rewards. As the American experimentalist composer John Cage said, his music was earthquake proof. By saying this, he meant that virtually anything could happen during the performance of one of his pieces - and it would be part of the piece. It was proof - precisely because it didn’t need to be excluded. Whether it was an earthquake, the sound of someone coughing, the blare of a siren - it would give his piece new life and lead to new music.

And so it is with life. Celebrate serendipity and who knows what words will ripple out of your keyboards on this soft spring day? Or what lines of prose and poetry will turn into the books which we can then pluck from the shelves and discover new ways of seeing the world? Take a chance. Throw away your map. Turn off your phone. Your Satnav. And go somewhere you’ve never been – with your words, mind and limb. Cross a field. Grab the arch of a rainbow. And just walk the line.

Best wishes -
Ariane Koek,
Director/Arvon Foundation

Ariane’s senses have been bombarded by:

Books
Southern Mail/Night Flight - Antoine Saint Exupery – Penguin Books

Exhibitions
James Turrell – A Life In Light – Louise T Blouin Foundation.

Film
Climates – Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Family Friend by Paolo Sorrentino

Music
A Chance Operation - The John Cage Tribute - Koch