THE
(LOST BUT SOMETIMES FOUND) ART OF SERENDIPITY
Ah, serendipity. All by itself, the word strikes a pleasant note. We
use it to mean the knack of making desirable discoveries by accident. Webster’s
tells the first use of this word was by Horace Walpole (1717-92). In a letter
to the American educator Horace Mann, Walpole said he formed it from the
Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes
"were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they
were not in quest of." Serendip is an old name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.
Serendipity can’t be described as just dumb luck. The real secret to it
is to be on the alert and ready for opportunities to do something
different. My husband and I have had
many serendipitous experiences in our travels.
One fine May afternoon, way back when, after our first pub lunch and a
lovely jaunt around southern England visiting Bodiam Castle, Battle (the Battle
being the Battle of Hastings) and Rye, we got back to our base in Tenterden,
Kent. We wandered off the High Street to the railroad station, part of the Kent
and East Sussex Railway. We were admiring a lovely old train when we were
approached by a charming man who asked us if we would like an adventure. Later
we learned that the restoration and preservation of the light railway and its rolling
stock was an entirely volunteer effort, and that part of their fund raising
effort was to serve dinner in an authentically restored Pullman car. Here’s the
serendipitous part: someone had had to cancel several bookings he’d made for
dinner on the Wealden Pullman, and there were a few reservations on offer. We
jumped at the chance.
Returning to our B & B to change into proper dinner attire, our
host congratulated us on our fortune, admitting that he’d not yet had his own
name come up on the waiting list. The bookings for this popular excursion, then
run only on warm-weather Saturdays, were next to impossible to get. We
understood why as the trip and the dinner progressed. Rolling serenely along
through the countryside, seated at a table for two, we enjoyed a delicious
four-course meal, served to perfection by perfectly uniformed volunteer
waiters, complete with aperitifs and wines, port and cigars. We passed on the
cigars. It certainly was just by accident that we turned up at the railway
station at the right time, and I don’t think it took too much sagacity to take
the chance for a different dining experience: we had to have diner no matter
what. The picture I took of Frank, seated across the table, shows a smile of
absolute delight and contentment.
Serendipity was disembarking last from a cruise ship in Bergen, Norway,
but finding ourselves first to be shown to a waiting taxi. Serendipity was
arriving at the ornately Victorian Papplewick Pumping Station in
Nottinghamshire on one of the few days in the year when they bring James Watt’s
huge beam engines up to full, working steam.
It was deciding to go to a bullfight in St. Remy-de-Provence, and
finding ourselves at a wonderful, elaborately-costumed ceremony on what turned
out to be the re-opening day of the refurbished arena.
Of course we’ve missed what might have been serendipitous moments by
being there too late: “you should have been here last week,” or too early: “can
you stay until next week when…comes to town?” But we never dwell on what we
might have been. After all, it isn’t as though we were sitting idly, twiddling
our thumbs and waiting for things to happen. No, we’ve been very serendipitous
in that respect.
No comments:
Post a Comment