Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which—miraculously, it seems—merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.
ATTRIBUTION:
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), Hungarian-born British author. “Janus: A Summing Up,” Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings with Comments by the Author, Hutchison (1980).
