It's Magic!

Every once in awhile I'm convinced that books are magical things brought down to earth to comfort us in times of need. I remember distinctly about 4 moments in my reading life -- no, no, make that 5 -- when I've been reading at a particular time in a particular place, and I think to myself, "There's no way this could be a coincidence."

Last night, the night of January 7, I was reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando. If anyone is familiar with that book -- and you should be because Woolf, like Tolstoy and Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, is as close to a perfect writer as they come -- there is a scene where Orlando meets a princess who can only speak French. This meeting happens to take place on January 7, the night I happened to be reading it. Okay, okay, that's not too impressive, but you have to realize that I'm currently living in Paris, France, where I'm doing a 6 month fellowship to learn some photosynthetic biophysics. I don't speak French, so I completely related to this princess's experience of being caught without the ability to talk to anyone. Call it what you want, but I've done the math, and the chances of this being simply coincidence is 0.000023%. Okay, I didn't really do the math. I hate statistics.