Sweet serendipity

The word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole on reading a “silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...."

I learned this word origin because this week Jane and Phineas were talking about ordering the Miracle Berry on the internet. When chewed, this purportedly causes sour substances to taste sweet. That’s the commercial name; she didn’t know the real name.

Later in the week Jane at graduation got talking with one of the seniors about his camera, a very nice Nikon like hers, and she asked him whether he had a tripod. He didn’t but he wanted one when he could afford it.

Coming home that evening Jane stopped to poke around a pile of stuff at the bottom of our hill marked, “free.” There was a perfectly good tripod just right for his camera!

It was “Kismet” she said when she told me the story, and I said, “Serendipitous!”

I had never heard of kismet. After the boys left the dinner table I asked, “What does kismet mean” and, first downloading a dictionary, tried to look it up on my iPod. Jane got a real dictionary and looked up kismet, meaning “fate.” Serendipity was a better fit: “finding something fortunate that one does not seek.”

Still downloading, I asked, “Where does serendipity come from?”  Searching for this word, Jane found instead the entry for serendipity berry: a berry, “when chewed, that causes sour substances to taste sweet.”

Tahatowan’s Scarab.

Henry and John Thoreau stopped on the banks of the Concord River on a Sunday evening in October 1837. Henry began to point out imagined Indian scenes. “Here,” he said, “stood Tahatowan”, and "there" (pointing to a spot) “is Tahatowan’s arrowhead.” Henry unconsciously picked up the first stone that came to hand and gave it to John. It was “a most perfect arrow-head, as sharp as if just from the hands of the Indian fabricator.”

One hundred years later, Carl Jung listened to a patient’s account of her dream about a golden scarab. There was a sound behind him. He reached back and caught a flying insect that had been tapping on the window. Jung handed the insect to his patient with the words, “Here is your golden scarab.” It was a gold-green scarabaeid beetle. This moment was the breakthrough in the therapy.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, Oct. 29, 1837; Carl G. Jung, “Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle,” The Collected Works of Carl Jung, Volume 8, p. 843.

Here stood Tahatowan. See February 15, 1857 ("Shattuck says that the principal sachem of our Indians, Tahattawan, lived 'near Nahshawtuck hill.'")