Coincidence, I Think Not

In My Dinner with André André Gregory said something that I share with you now:

One day in the early fall I was out in the country, walking in a field, and I suddenly heard a voice say "Little Prince ." Now The Little Prince, of course, was a book that I had always thought of as disgusting, childish treacle, but still, I thought, Well, if a voice comes to me in a field-this was the first voice I had ever heard-maybe I should go and read the book. Now that same morning I had gotten a letter from one of the women who had been in my group in Poland. And in her letter she had said "You have dominated me." She spoke, you know, very awkward English. And so she'd gone to the dictionary, and she'd crossed out the word "dominated" and written, "No, the correct word is 'tamed.'" And then when I went into town and bought the book and started to read it, I saw that "taming" was the most important word in the whole book. And by the end of the book I was in tears, I was so moved by the story. And I went to try to write an answer to the letter because she'd sent me a very long letter, but I just couldn't find the right words. So I finally took my hand, put it on a piece of paper and outlined it with a pen and put in the center something like "Your heart is in my hand"-something like that. And then I went over to my brother's house to swim, because he lives nearby in the country and he has a pool, and he wasn't there. And I went into his library, and he had bought at an auction the collected issues of Minotaur-you know, the surrealist magazine-it was a great, great surrealist magazine of the twenties and thirties that had all kinds of people like Dali and so on-and I had never-because I consider myself a bit of a surrealist-I had never ever seen a copy of Minotaur. And here they were, bound, year after year. So, at random, I picked one out, and I opened it, and there was a full-page reproduction of the letter "A" from Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland. And I thought, That's-Well, you know, it's been a day of coincidence, but that's not unusual, that the surrealists would have been interested in Alice and I did a play of Alice. So I opened to another page, and there were four hand prints. One was André Breton, another was André Derain, the third was André-I've got it written down somewhere, it's not Malraux, it's like-someone-another of the surrealists-all A's-and the fourth was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince. And they'd given these handprints to some kind of an expert without saying whose hands they belonged to, and under Saint-Exupéry it said he was an artist with very powerful eyes who was a tamer of wild animals. So I thought, This is incredible, you know. And I looked back to see when this issue came out, and it came out on the newsstands May 12, 1934, and I was born during the day of May 11, 1934.

Whenever I feel a sense of déjà vu or when coincidences pile up, I am reminded of this particular scene and of a quote by Deepak Chopra, "Coincidences are not accidents but signals from the universe which can guide us toward our true destiny."