After a brief hiatus, Limns is back with an appropriate word of the month: serendipity. Unlike all of the previous etymologies we have explored in this newsletter, serendipity is, essentially, a made up word. It has no roots to trace, no prefix or verbal stem to parse. In this sense, the word is an example of its own definition: “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”
The word came into English through a letter, written by Horace Walpole in the 18th century. Inspired by a Persian fairytale (The Three Princes of Serendip) in which the princes, according to Walpole, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of,” he coined the English word ‘Serendipity.’
Let’s take a moment to sit with this quote. First off, I love the ‘and’ that links “accidents and sagacity.” Sagacity means wisdom, or shrewdness. What a lovely pairing, to put together the accidental with the calculated. And isn’t it true, in a lived sense, that our discoveries are so often (if not always) a product of both these things? That we do our best to predict, to read the patterns, to steer our ship in a wise direction, while also acknowledging as we grow older that most of what we discover has an element of the random, of happenstance, of accidents?
Another way of putting this sentiment is the trope that what we worry about is never what actually transpires (something worrying inevitably does happen, but it’s rarely what we actually predict), and conversely, what we long for is rarely what ends up happening, but instead, something beautiful that we did not even know to imagine grows to fill its place.
The word serendipity is a net for the wake of life. I imagine the princes in this fairytale riding off on their quest, a kind of compass fixed in their mind’s eye, while the real horizon fills up with forks in the road, the strangers they will depend on, the storms out of their control, the relief of receiving something they did not know they needed.
In the modern day, we use serendipity rarely, and in a very watered down sense. We lean primarily on the accidental part, and mostly in relation to humans–for example, “serendipitously, right after I received my A level results I bumped into Mrs. Nolan.” There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this usage, but it does diminish the magic and wisdom of its origins.
Serendipity is not, in my opinion, meant to explain away the coincidences of life. It is meant to point to the true nature of living. It is a reminder to not treat all the discoveries along the way as a side show, when they might be the real event.
We have a habit, as humans, of rewriting our memory around serendipity. When the course changes, we tend to superimpose our will onto it. We ‘pivot.’ This is indicative of how uncomfortable we are with randomness. While we may accept that things we couldn’t have predicted do occur, we feel the need to graft them onto the realm of our control, to somehow ‘account’ for them. But what if accepted their true nature, as discoveries, “made by accident and sagacity” while we are on our quest for something else?