I found Beatrice and Virgil at Grounds for Thought in Bowling Green Ohio, over to the left of my tiny table perch while waiting to get my car inspected. This coffee shop has a wraparound floor plan and the secret back area is usually dead silent with a nice musty bookstore odor to accompany your glass-mug caffeine of choice. The floors are well worn, as are the electrical outlets, and the panoply of books and ephemera renders as intriguing than overstimulating somehow.
I look left and scan, noting known titles or popularities, or thinking up which “M’s” I know in my reading backlog and I spot Yann Martel’s books, and a cute hardback called Beatrice and Virgil with an appealing jacket and thick clean pages. I start reading.
It feels serendipitous: a returning to my essays on Life of Pi while young in college, and a reminder of happy naïve reading that for all of my twenties I abjured for intense philosophical study (which, philosophy for a twenty-something is a fine way to avoid one’s actual life problems… more on that elsewhere). Something like joy welled up in me.
Another serendipity looms, or more a synchronicity in Jungian fashion, where the topic of Henry’s book is the holocaust. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching The Man in the High Castle, a historical fiction just of the sort Henry is trying to get us to either make, or expand beyond in terms of fiction (I will find out). Sometimes when these “topics” congeal in my life it feels more than accidental.
Serendipity landed harder when the back cover mentioned “who we are and what we are capable of doing in order to survive”– which I read in the wake of finding out I needed $2300 in repairs on my car in the midst of a move and the weeks-long delay of my summer job starting with fall school fees looming. Still, I think these are pedestrian problems in light of people I know and people who I imagine exist. I can make it. Struggle makes me feel alive, said Alysa Liu.
I like to take these serendipities and run with them, because generally my question of “what to do next” has to be answered by a throughline where I grow my network of experience into a “pocket” of inquiry: Oh this part over here I connected to these other texts, which have such and such philosophical import overall etc. As Henry says: “stories…are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole.”
To pursue a throughline in our thinking is sort of banal, but it’s also existential: how do we choose what to do? Why pursue THAT? We either chase after things with rational justifications, or let the waters of life guide us. We vary in our authenticity when approaching the question.
This throughline is important compared to what algorithms give us. We have ANY sort of content thrown at us. There’s a haphazardness to it, and what Kierkegaard or Dreyfus would call a “leveling” of importance. Everything is treated as equally valuable.**
“What Kierkegaard envisaged as a consequence of the Press’s indiscriminate coverage and dissemination is now fully realized on the World Wide Web. All meaningful differences are, indeed, leveled. Relevance and significance have disappeared. And this is an important part of the attraction of the web. Nothing is too trivial to be included.”1
In contrast, I say to the serendipitous, only certain things are valuable, and they are related to what we already are in some fashion. That might sound like a contradiction: serendipity and what you already are. But for something to feel like serendipity it has to feel coherent. It “breaks in” somehow because it is relevant, and what is relevant is funded by a significant backlog of experience. It also contains its own numinous quality of being beyond randomness.
Anyways, the ensuing exposition reads much like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: A pseudonymous author self-narrates their philosophical aims and misunderstandings from the institutional guardians. It’s a sort of procedural, a story outside of the story before the story proper begins. But it’s also in the space of something working to be philosophical while being eminently readable, and itself indicates how fiction and the “low brow” can be deeply important:
“Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it’s true.”
I am here in my present struggle, the book is tending to significance based on my personal history, and it’s been years since I let reading just be about simple truth in light of what I’m experiencing. Maybe it’s time to love what I read again.
**
**I think there’s a nice discussion to have there: we encounter randomness in life, don’t we? And the algorithm feeds us curated content, so it’s not “random.” But clearly unimportant, or trolling, or absurd or etc. content is rampant and it inverses what is “valuable” to humans in gaming the algorithm.
I think few would say they encounter numinous serendipity online, as I will discuss shortly.
1
Wrathall, Mark A. (ed.), ‘Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity versus Commitment in the Present Age (2004)’, in Mark A. Wrathall (ed.), Nihilism and the Technological Age, in Mark A. Wrathall (ed.), Background Practices: Essays on the Understanding of Being (Oxford, 2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 July 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796220.003.0012, accessed 29 June 2026.
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