The Center- a story about coincidence
This was a different entry but I feel like what I'm writing now is more important/interesting/bizarre.
I am writing an essay for my nonfiction class about being eighteen. It's supposed to be in the style of Joan Didion, a famous nonfiction writer whose book The Year of Magical Thinking we've just read in my class. Remember that name, Joan Didion.
My essay is pretty crap but it's filled with allusions, because eighteen was a year of portents and signs for me, which is odd because I don't believe in that sort of thing. However I do believe in strange coincidences, and about 5 things have just come together in a sort of beautifully interconnected way, so obviously that when I saw it I literally gasped, slapped my desk, and shouted "oh my god!".
So I've always loved this Yeats poem, The Second Coming. I first saw it referenced in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which are themselves filled with signs, portents, and uncanny coincidence (make of that what you will). There's this line in The Second Coming that I quote constantly when I'm feeling strange:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
I wrote it in a section of the story I was writing in high school, where the main character talks about being afraid to turn eighteen. Let me quote the section:
"A line of poetry flickered through Paul's head; 'Things fall apart; the center cannot hold'. He couldn't remember who wrote it, but in the darkened room, it seemed like the only truth."
Now let me quote my essay:
"There is a section in the story about being eighteen, the beauty and terror of being an adult. The way we run to and away from being in charge of ourselves. Eighteen is a strange age to be."
and in the next paragraph:
"I remember the line that caught my eye and repeated itself like a mantra was “I didn’t vote for any ghosts”. Caught in my head like I am eighteen, like that line from that poem by Yeats- “The center cannot hold”. Sometimes these little phrases seem like the only truth."
That in itself is completely explainable- the repetition of the quote, which as I've said I reference constantly, and the line "seems like the only truth", which I remember from writing it myself.
At this point I should mention that earlier this evening, I was annoyed with my writing and I googled "autobiographical essays without getting maudlin" and this was the first link on the google search page that resulted:
Now, as I write my line about Yeats, I can't remember the name of the poem, so I google it quickly, using the quoted line "the center cannot hold" as the words in my search. The first few results are for an autobiography that quotes the line in its title, and then a link to the actual poem. And beneath that:
Joan Didion. John Mauldin. Mauldin can't be a common last name. And when I click on the first link to see what connection Didion has to the poem (she's published a book of essays entitled Slouching Towards Bethlehem), I see this:
I just downloaded this EP 2 days ago.
This is a lot of coincidence around a poem I ascribe a lot to anyway, and I'm in a strange and superstitious mood anyway tonight. Does this strike any of you as odd or beautiful or kind of a little bit magic, or am I making something out of nothing? I feel like this somehow lends credence to my idea that everything is interconnected.