Pessoa and Other Coincidences

1.

When I lived in Lisbon for a year, ten years ago, mostly I walked around the city, but I occasionally took the metro. Once, on a train, I noticed a woman about my age standing about 20 feet away, holding a pole, facing the other direction, with a tote bag over her shoulder that I recognized as from the independent bookstore near my grad school thousands of miles away in Chicago. After a moment of confusion, I walked over and introduced myself.

Kirsten was from a small town in downstate Illinois and had gone to the University of Chicago as an undergrad. She was in Lisbon doing postdoctoral work on malaria at Portugal's Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; this train was her daily commute. I don't remember where I was going on the metro that day — to the Museu Gulbenkian? to my Portuguese class at the Universidade de Lisboa? to the fancy grocery store that carried normal milk? — but that doesn't matter.

Meeting Kirsten was a coincidence, rare and pure. There were multiple causes behind it — whatever my reason for being on that train that day in Lisbon, and Kirsten's; our status as (current and former) grad students underlying our ability to live in Europe as Americans — but they don't add up to a cause for the coincidence. They don't explain our meeting. That, in fact, is what makes it a coincidence: if you could rationalize it, it wouldn't be a coincidence at all. Coincidence is one name for an event that feels rich with significance but, because of the insufficiency of causality, is ultimately resistant to interpretation.

By telling contrast, consider what's known as "the birthday paradox:" if you gather 23 people in a room, there is a greater than 50% chance that two people share a birthday. This seems unlikely: most years have 365 days, and 50% of 365 is 182.5, which is nearly eight times larger than 23. It might feel coincidental — unlikely, even inexplicable — to find someone else sharing your birthday in a group the size of an elementary school classroom. But the birthday paradox is a paradox because its unlikeliness melts away with better math. Each group of 23 people has 253 possible pairs of people (23 x 22), which is, of course, well over 182.5. What feels like a wonder can be absorbed into a rational explanation. There's still trace of it left — why this pair? why that date? — but the shivery unlikeliness of finding another person like you, or at least with your tote bag, is mostly gone.

Coincidences are like dreams. If you're somewhere on the spectrum between Freud and, say, a neurologist, you might share my vague sense that dreams feel deep with significance, rich with content, but also all slippery surface. They invite and thwart analysis. They're not, as Shakespeare writes at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, shaking the audience up into applause, "yielding."1

Coincidence also doesn't yield. A coincidence doesn't bear interpretation; interpretation finds no give in it. With a coincidence, meaningfulness and unmeaningfulness are held, briefly, almost as a wish, to be commensurate with one another. But it's hard to say much beyond that: interpretation of coincidence, at least one that doesn't turn paranoid, is at the limits of possibility. 

I didn't know it at the time, but I wrote my dissertation to clarify to myself that coincidences are not interpretable. Another way of saying this is that my dissertation, which I began when I was living in Lisbon, though it's about American poetry, was also about some prose written by Fernando Pessoa, though it didn't mention it or him. What I wanted was the surety that, with enough information and thought, everything could fit together. But it doesn't.

2.

"What are the odds?" Andrew H. Miller asks on the first page of On Not Being Someone Else (2020), recognizing that his own life is underdetermined, that it is "a life so unlikely, yet so inescapable."2 The attention that we give to the other roads we might have taken has to do, he writes, with our sense of our own singularity, "only one person and only this person."3 In this book about unlived lives, Miller is more concerned with contingency — "how things might have been but are not" — than with coincidence.4 Christina Lupton describes contingency this way in a special issue of Textual Practice dedicated to literature and contingency: "Contingency . . . differs from chance in the way it brings temporality into focus . . . its defining feature lies in the suggestion that things that have already happened might have been otherwise."5

But if contingency "brings temporality into focus" and reminds us that things could be "otherwise," coincidence focuses not forward or backward or elsewhere but looks at the thing that has happened, is happening, that could not have been planned or expected. If contingency imagines life as diverging paths, coincidence is a moment of anastomosis, encounter, reencounter. A coincidence might be contingent, but the point is not that it could be otherwise but that it happened at all, that it was this way.

Not being someone else is a matter of contingency, but being who we are is coincidence. As Elizabeth Bishop writes in "In the Waiting Room," her speaker's life is also "a life so unlikely, yet so inescapable," and yet she's "in it."6

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn't know any
word for it—how "unlikely". . .7

I go back and forth on what Bishop's speaker means by "unlikely." If she knew another word for it, what would that word be? In the book chapter I'm finishing, I describe this poem as about contingency — the young speaker's own existence, she suddenly realizes, was underdetermined, it could have been otherwise. The "cry of pain . . . could have/got loud and worse but hadn't."

But it's also coincidental, isn't it? There isn't a cause of why she is herself — why she isn't her aunt or anyone else — but she longs for one and imagines there could be one, that it's meaningful, that she is meaningful. Why is the request for an explanation. And explanations, according to philosophers of science such as Carl Hempel, require identifiable causes, what he calls an explanans.8 The philosopher Donald Davidson argues that, for people, reasons count as causes for the purposes of explanation in that they too rationalize actions.9 An explanation is a particular, and a particularly strict, form of interpretation; by identifying a cause or reason, it offers predictive power. An interpretation is more local, rationalizing just one event or phenomenon.

Is Bishop's speaker's inability to find a better word than unlikely a matter of her limited vocabulary or of a bigger, stranger, harder problem? If it's the former, then she's talking about contingency. But if it's the latter, as I sometimes suspect, then she's running up against coincidence and how it causes interpretation to sputter and stop. That ellipsis — "how 'unlikely'. . ." — is in the poem. The speaker trails off because there's nowhere meaningful for her to go, or at least that she's willing to consider. Sean Silver writes, in the same special issue of Textual Practice on contingency that "Contingency enters philosophy as an epistemological solution to a metaphysical problem."10 But coincidence shows that it's an imperfect solution, a patch with a leak, and the metaphysical problem of why things happened as they did remains. Bishop's speaker, I think, wants a deductive-nomological explanation, one that Hempel would have approved of, though she might settle for an interpretation. But all she gets is more description. Her being herself is not interpretable because there is no interpretation of a coincidence — it has only inadequate causes or necessary but insufficient reasons.

Philosophers of science, following Hempel, offer two related accounts of coincidence and neither helps me. The first is Hans Reichenbach's; he writes, "if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause" that connects the two apparently unrelated events.11 Coincidence, then, isn't really. Wesley Salmon incorporates his mentor Reichenbach's idea into his own work on causal processes and offers an addition model of causality in which two unconnected causal processes cross one another, like an X; a coincidence is at the center.12 Salmon is interested in the mechanisms of what he calls aleatory causality, but his account has been criticized for being insufficiently explanatory. Christopher Hitchcock, for example, writes that Salmon's account of explanation can't answer "what-if-things-had-been-different" questions because it doesn't say which properties are relevant, which is to say, his causality is only descriptive.13 It's much easier to say what happened than why.

Coincidence begs an interpretation. A coincidence begs an interpretation in both senses that a question can be begged: it asks for an interpretation, and also uses the lack of one as an example of itself. Sometimes an effect is pressed into service as a cause: a coincidence had to have happened because what it set into motion was so monumental that the alternative can't be imagined. Or maybe cause grows and metastasizes into conspiracies: men behind the curtain pulling the strings, deep states. Or maybe we have the sense that fate or another divine force is behind coincidences — in other words, conspiracies, or, as the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Prichard writes, "witchcraft." Evans-Pritchard, in his 1937 book, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, has a famous example — "the granary" — that is exactly about how interpretation is begged and how the insufficiency of causality to explain coincidence overstuffs it with uninterpretable meaningfulness, if not meaning.

In Zandeland sometimes an old granary collapses. There is nothing remarkable in this. Every Zande knows that termites eat the supports in course of time and that even the hardest woods decay after years of service. Now a granary is the summerhouse of a Zande homestead and people sit beneath it in the heat of the day and chat or play the African hole-game or work at some craft. Consequently it may happen that there are people sitting beneath the granary when it collapses and they are injured, for it is a heavy structure made of beams and clay and may be stored with eleusine as well. Now why should these particular people have been sitting under this particular granary at the particular moment when it collapsed? That it should collapse is easily intelligible, but why should it have collapsed at the particular moment when these particular people were sitting beneath it? Through years it might have collapsed, so why should it fall just when certain people sought its kindly shelter? We say that the granary collapsed because its supports were eaten away by termites. That is the cause that explains the collapse of the granary. We also say that people were sitting under it at the time because it was in the heat of the day and they thought it would be a comfortable place to talk and work. This is the cause of people being under the granary at the time it collapsed. To our minds the only relationship between these two independently caused facts is their coincidence in time and space. We have no explanation of why the two chains of causation intersected at the certain time and in a certain place, for there is no interdependence between them . . . The Zande knows that the supports were undermined by termites and that people were sitting beneath the granary in order to escape the heat of the sun. But he knows besides why these two events occurred at a precisely similar moment in time and space. It was due to the action of witchcraft. If there had been no witchcraft people would have been sitting under the granary and it would not have fallen on them, or it would have collapsed but the people would not have been sheltering under it at the time. Witchcraft explains the coincidence of these two happenings."14

Maybe witchcraft is just a way of talking — or not talking — about luck. Maybe it's wrong to frame coincidence as having to do with cause when it really has to do with chance. Sometimes a granary collapses and sometimes these people sat beneath it. Bishop's young speaker's term — "unlikely" — comes to us from probability. And yet, all the same problems are here too in different terms: if coincidence is the logical product of chance, it can be explained by calculations of probability in lieu of identification of causality. In this case, one can look again to Hempel and see his relative comfort with probability serving as the basis for explanation.15

Also, the more a coincidence can be described as probable, the less of a coincidence it is. The bar here is very high: "one in a million," we say about something very rare, and for a coincidence, this must be understatement and not hyperbole. The likelihood can't really be calculable; we have to be able to say "what were the odds?" and be met with bewildered shrugs or expressions of astonishment, not answered with math. When Miller begins his book by asking it, it's a rhetorical question. But when Bishop's speaker asks this question, it's not. So while we might describe the unlikeliness of a coincidence with descriptions of chance, the events and phenomena that we identify as coincidences are such because we're claiming that they exceed randomness and defy probability. I could then say that a coincidence is a wonder precisely because it feels so unlikely. In this case again, a coincidence is not rationalized, and, to remain coincidental, can't be.

A coincidence feels like witchcraft. A coincidence is a wonder. These are both ways of measuring the space that explanation can't erase and interpretation can't fill. I'd like to take seriously Bishop's young speaker's assertion that she "knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened, that nothing / stranger could ever happen."16 She's experiencing wonder, an experience that's not rationalizable, "falling off / the round, turning world / into cold, blue-black space."17 A structure has collapsed. Wonder isn't always fun.

3.

When I lived in Lisbon, when it was early June and all of the jacarandas were blooming above the marble mosaic cobblestone streets and on every sidewalk plywood was being assembled into outdoor cafés where sardines would soon be roasted in celebration of Santo António, and when, although I was tired of struggling with a language that I could not even hold a conversation in despite months of effort, I was beginning to feel nostalgic in advance about our time there coming to an end, I looked through the window of a shop with no sign, saw that it had a few racks of what appeared to be vintage dresses, and went in. I immediately found a handmade dress from the 1940s or 1950s. It was white with small dark blue stars — more like asterisks — embroidered on it, and I bought it without trying it on. At home, I discovered that the dress fit perfectly, more precisely and flatteringly than anything I had ever worn before, or, honestly, since.

This second Lisbon coincidence is one of my best, completely wondrous, since it suggests that sometime in the middle of the last century, there was someone entirely unrelated to me who was, in a way, also me. I followed the slightly varying stitches with my finger, wondering, was it she who sewed the dress by hand? Though I was frequently mistaken for Portuguese, my black hair and olive-skin have to do with being ethnically Jewish (an explanation that is usually met with incomprehension in Europe, which is also where it is most frequently demanded). I was just in Lisbon for the year tagging along on my husband's Fulbright.

So much of that year felt enchanted, charmed, magical: my new husband and I had found each other, then we found ourselves in Europe, then we found our ways to an empty, endless beach, a hidden fado club, an illegal restaurant in an apartment, the best pastries, and an unlocked door in a corner of the church of São Vicente that opened onto a spiral staircase that led all the way to the roof — no guardrails, no signs, no one else — where we walked around and then sat and marveled at our tremendous luck.

But also — I didn't know how to start my dissertation, so moving to a different continent was even more appealing. I had turned in a nonsensical prospectus that had been approved only because the person I had wanted to be my advisor was no longer at the university, and the person replacing him was also in the process of leaving. It was becoming clear that the academic job market was not going to recover, and I wasn't sure I was going to, or should, or even could, finish my Ph.D. During my parents' visit that fall, I cried in restaurants when they tried to ask me how (and also what) I was doing.

What was I doing? I went to Portuguese classes for part of the year; and for all of the year, I walked around the city, I drank coffee at tiny nameless cafés, I went to museums, and I read. Mostly, I read. Our apartment, in Alfama, the medieval neighborhood of the city, was on a street that existed only for half a block before turning into stairs, and it had two pairs of french doors that opened to a narrow balcony. Off that balcony, we hung our laundry and watched groups of lost German tourists stare at maps of the neighborhood, then turn their maps upside down and stare again; on the balcony, a few pots of lantana and geranium bloomed; and through the doors, yellow sunlight saturated the room. Portuguese has a special word for that quality of sunlight, and another for when it turns the Tagus silver, but I can't remember them anymore. I sat on our orange futon couch, in a beam, and read.

My reading material was arbitrary, mostly due to the difficulty of getting books. Lisbon didn't have an English language bookstore. Portuguese bookstores were eclectic, rarely alphabetized, and at best, they had brief English language shelves stocked mostly with guidebooks and translations of Portuguese authors. I didn't have a Kindle — I didn't even have a smartphone yet — and Amazon UK sometimes delivered some things after long delays, and anyway we couldn't afford it frequently. A friend who worked for Knopf in New York somehow managed to ship a few boxes of books to us, so I read the novels, memoirs, and cookbooks they happened to publish that year. I had a fat binder of articles and chapters, mostly very dry philosophy of science, that I had hastily copied in a couple frantic days at my university library on a variety of hunches before fleeing the country, and I tried, and eventually succeeded, at reading it. I tried but failed to read Twilight in Portuguese (O Crepúsculo). So I read a lot of Portuguese writers in translation: a fair amount of José Saramago, who died the week after I bought the dress, and a lot of Fernando Pessoa — especially, multiple times, The Book of Disquiet. In Portuguese, it's O Livro de Desassosego.18

4.

Fernando Pessoa was born in 1888, on June 13^th, the celebration of Lisbon's patron Santo António, and he died in 1935. His family lived in South Africa for nine years when he was a child, but otherwise, he spent his whole life in Lisbon. Or maybe I should say his lives. Before his death, Pessoa published some essays, poems, and excerpts of . . . whatever The Book of Disquiet is, but most of his writing was found after his death in a large trunk. There were poems. There were also, to quote Richard Zenith, one of Pessoa's most important translators, "prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, horoscopes and other texts, variously typed, handwritten, or illegibly scrawled in Portuguese, English, and French."19 And while these were all written by Pessoa, they also were not: from the time he was five years old, he wrote under personae that he called heteronyms. He had dozens and dozens of heteronyms — over seventy — each with their own biography, tastes, styles, and religious and political beliefs. Pessoa's heteronyms wrote letters to each other and introductions to each other's work. A few are the most prominent: the classicist and physician Ricardo Reis; the Whitmanian naval engineer Álvaro de Campos; the master poet admired by Reis, Campos, and Pessoa himself, the shepherd Alberto Caeiro; as well as the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares. Zenith includes a five-page table of heteronyms in the appendix to The Book of Disquiet, which is a book written by Soares, or sort of. It's written by Pessoa, of course, but also by Soares, though Soares is almost Pessoa. "Pessoa" means person in Portuguese (also persona).20

The Book of Disquiet was left in fragments and will always be an unstable assortment of around 450 observations, brief manifestos, diary entries, daydreams, aphorisms, and "random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random."21 Editors don't agree on the exact number of sections. The length of each section ranges from a single sentence to a few hundred words, maybe two pages. Most sections are less than a page, though not much less. There is no plot or progression over its hundreds of pages. There are no characters, really, other than Soares, and he doesn't develop. The sections could be rearranged, and have been, without deforming the book as a whole. (The book may not be a whole.) Even within individual sections, I have the sense that paragraphs or even sentences could be rearranged.

I had planned to put a quotation from The Book of Disquiet here as an example, but it's hard to choose. The problem is that I could choose anything, but also I can't choose anything. Soares — no, wait, I mean Pessoa, wait, do I? — writes, "One reflection is as good as another, for they are the same."22 But also, any quotation placed in this essay will seem to bear the weight of evidence in an argument. Swallowing a coin doesn't mean it's food, though, and any example here would similarly remain indigestible. 

So I've only described The Book of Disquiet. I can't interpret it because it either is, or makes a persuasive front of being arranged causelessly, without design, without reasons. As far as I know, it's not a book written through chance operations, like Oulipo, and even that would give me a way of making sense of how it came to be. The Book of Disquiet gives the impression of having emerged by coincidence at every level.

"I try to explain to myself how I got here," one section of The Book of Disquiet ends.23 But the next does not continue to try to explain anything, or, anyway, not to us.

5.

When I read The Book of Disquiet, I wanted to understand it and I couldn't. I read Zenith's English translation first, and, several years later, Margaret Jull Costa's; the new translation didn't help.

For a while, I thought that I couldn't understand Pessoa because I wasn't a Lisboeta, not a true alfacinha, just an American abroad cosplaying a Henry James character, and my difficulty understanding Pessoa was of the same kind as my difficulty understanding the bank teller when she (maybe?) made a joke.

Then, after I left and looked back on that year, I changed my mind. I didn't understand Pessoa not because I didn't have the right identity or background, but because I didn't have the right critical lens. If I had one, his work would come into focus, I thought, like 3-D glasses that turn red and blue blurry images into crisp shapes. Or maybe, because he's sui generis, maybe no lens that already exists will do. Maybe, I thought, I was awaiting the book or even the article that would show me how to understand him. But the skeleton key could exist — or maybe I might someday be able to fashion one. 

What is it that I was asking for when I say that I wanted to understand him? I already enjoyed him. Some writers leave a tune in my ear forever, easy to summon, like the tinkliness of Mozart. Among these, for me, are the sharp edges of Emily Dickinson, the cool touches of Marianne Moore, and the meanders around corners to sudden lookouts (miradouros) of Bernardo Soares/Fernando Pessoa.

But I wanted something beyond this and I felt lost without it. I wanted to know what all these different pieces had to do with each other, how they were connected, that they were connected. I wanted not just a map but a cause. I wanted meaning in how fragments are brought together. I wanted an interpretation. I wanted to know that The Book of Disquiet is interpretable and not just a series of coincidences. This is what the right critical lens would bring into focus.

One way of describing this essay would be to say that I'm now, a decade later, allowing myself to admit that no skeleton key exists. That Pessoa is a wonder. That wonders aren't always fun.

6.

Desassosego, disquiet, could also be translated as the state of being unsettled or disturbed. Sossegar is the verb for to calm or to settle down, desassossegar is its opposite, and desassosego is the noun. The Book of Disquiet is about this feeling. Soares is unsatisfied as he roams mentally and physically through Lisbon. The book is disquieted, in that it won't be a stable text. And that makes its readers, or anyway, me, also disquieted.

The Book of Disquiet begins with a coincidence. A preface, written by Fernando Pessoa, describes how he met Bernardo Soares. They are both regular patrons of a restaurant, both usually eating dinner at 7pm. Pessoa notices "a certain man who didn't interest me at first, but then began to."

Fairly tall and thin, he must have been about thirty years old. He hunched over terribly when sitting down but less so standing up, and he dressed with a carelessness that wasn't entirely careless. In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn't add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested.24

They begin to greet each other casually each evening. "And then one day, perhaps drawn together by the stupid coincidence that we both arrived for dinner at nine-thirty, we struck up a conversation."25 There's no apparent reason why Pessoa and Soares both arrived two and a half hours after their usual dining times, but both did. It might have been otherwise, but it's coincidental that it happened as it did.

Or, alternatively, we might say that it's not a coincidence at all. Soares, is, after all, a heteronym of Pessoa, and this is a literary text written by Pessoa. There are no accidents in the meeting of these two, since Pessoa designed it this way. Lupton points out that "events that appear by chance in literature are always planted there; accidents represented in fiction are by definition premeditated."26 We could say that coincidences in real life look like they were by design but weren't, but coincidences in art look like this too, but are.

And, as yet another alternative, Pessoa credits Soares with designing their meeting; "he'd draw me to himself" to publish his — Soares's — book, The Book of Disquiet.27 (Again, though, I remind myself, in this mise en abyme, that Pessoa wrote that too.)

This meeting is uninterpretable; it is like the description of Soares: "carelessness that wasn't entirely careless," a face that has a look of suffering, but about which it is "difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested." What seems like it might be explanation turns out to be just description. This might be a description of how coincidence works in general. The surface of what you think is a deep lake turns into a flat, hard mirror, and you feel your own force against it.

7.

A hunch: the most coincidental thing, the epitome and also limit case of coincidence, is meeting yourself. On the way toward that limit is meeting another person like you, with your birthday, or with your tote bag on a subway in a foreign country. But all the way at that limit is another you. Nothing is more unlikely or less interpretable.

Bishop's young speaker, in "In the Waiting Room" hears her aunt's voice as her own and meets herself.

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo's voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918. 28

This rational little girl's ability to rationalize fails her. She doesn't have the words, and then, briefly, she loses her grip on the world.

When I found the dress in Lisbon and I brushed against another me, I had the sense of nearly meeting myself. Also, though this was slighter, when I met Kirsten on the train. Or even when, also at the end of our stay, I took a new route back from the bakery and, just 75 yards from our apartment, saw a sign marked Rua da Judiaria, and I realized that I had lived for a year on the edge of the medieval Jewish quarter. I suddenly remembered some family lore that my Dutch grandmother's ancestors had fled to the Netherlands in the 16^th century from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition when the Habsburgs ruled both. Had I been met as Portuguese, accurate even if in the dimmest way, all year long?

Pessoa meeting Soares at the restaurant in the book that Soares is writing that Pessoa is also writing is Pessoa meeting himself. Miller writes about our singularity, that each of us is "only one person and only this person." Bishop asks what "made us all just one?" Pessoa — and his heteronyms — don't accept these terms. It's disquieting and also wondrous. It's a little bit different than saying, Whitmanically, that one contains multitudes. It's not about branching out into multiplicity, but about branching paths joining again. For Pessoa, refusing to see Soares as himself, words come. For me, reading him, remembering that Pessoa is both men, they fail.

There are two bronze statues of Pessoa in Lisbon, about one block away from each other. One is life-sized, just outside of a café he used to frequent, A Brasileira. In a suit and bowtie, wearing his hat and glasses, his left ankle resting on his right knee, his hands mid-gesture, he's sitting down at a small table like those in the café inside. There's an empty chair next to him; it's a favorite spot for tourists to sit and clown for a photo. The other, in front of his birthplace on Largo de São Carlos, is very tall — twice the height of a person — and is of a person, but with his head replaced by a book. On the front cover it says PESSOA and on the back LISBOA. I imagine the book-headed statue breaking free of its marble pediment, walking a short distance, and meeting himself for uma meia de leite. No one can overhear what they say.

8.

James Joyce is nearly an exact contemporary of Pessoa — and looks strangely similar — and in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter of Ulysses, Stephen, talking about Shakespeare, quotes the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck before continuing: "Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."29 This cast of characters sounds like the characters of Ulysses: robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. Stephen and Bloom meet each other, and so then also meet themselves, but maybe we do as well. Here, the coincidence — the anastomosis, the rejoining of the branches — is inevitable.

Another hunch: when you read a book that is just the thing you needed to read just then, it's a coincidence of this kind. You meet yourself. A granary collapses on you. And it feels both contingent and inevitable, causeless, wondrous, and disquieting.

Coincidence might tell us something about how some literary texts — Pessoa's in particular, but not only his — feel like witchcraft. But that's ultimately because literary texts tell us about how we make meaning, and also how the meaning we are able to make exceeds the frames we have. A Midsummer Night's Dream also shows us this. When, at the end, Puck asks the audience to think that everything they've seen on stage was a dream — "Think but this, and all is mended" — he's asking us to squeeze ourselves back into reality, to remember that the fairies were actors, and to make witchcraft into explanation, and so sew closed what was stretched open in space, time, and reason itself, yes, to withdraw ourselves from the world of art and collapse it, draw the curtains, shut the book.30

For the night before our wedding — one month before we left for Lisbon — instead of a rehearsal dinner, we asked some of our friends and cousins to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream. We built a small stage in our backyard and hung lights from tree branches. We played Theseus and Hippolyta, about to be married. It shouldn't have worked, of course. There were no rehearsals, since everyone was flying in from around the country in the hours just before, and most had never even met each other. I remember standing on the stage, starting the play with my lines about the moon "like to a silver bow/New-bent in heaven," looking out at the faces of the hundred people I loved most in the world, and wondering what on earth we were doing.31 But the play went beautifully. Everything went beautifully. I can't explain it at all.

9.

A senior scholar in my field was hired by my department the year after we returned. I made an appointment to talk with her and tried to hide my desperation while describing my project, which I had, by then, begun writing, but it was rough and strange to the point of being almost feral. She generously asked me if I was looking for a committee member. "I'm looking for an advisor," I said and she didn't blink. I was able to finish my Ph.D.

I ended up writing about coincidence, in a way, or really about its inverse or negative image: I wrote a dissertation on explanation, growing out of the dry philosophy of science photocopies that I had dragged to Lisbon with me, a number of which were by Hempel. But also because of my own desire for one, for things not to be coincidental. I wrote about Bishop. I wrote a separate article about Joyce. But I've never written about Pessoa. I lost touch with Kirsten after a few years. The dress still hangs in our closet but I don't wear it much anymore.

---

My profound thanks to V. Joshua Adams, Joshua Kotin, Emily Ogden, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Dan Sinykin, all of whom offered thoughtful and generous comments that greatly improved this essay. Thanks also to Rivky Mondal, Lisa Siraganian, Michelle Taylor, and Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, who, along with the other contributors listed above, inspired and strengthened my thinking about interpretation and its difficulties. I'll also take this opportunity to express my enduring gratitude to Maud Ellmann. 

---

Johanna Winant (@johannawinant) is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University. She's completing a book on modern American poetry and philosophy titled Lyric Logic, and her writing has been published in Poetics Today, JML, Paideuma, James Joyce Quarterly, Slate, ASAP/J, Avidly, and elsewhere. 

---

References