literary irony
word coincidences...that's all i can think of to call them. have you ever had these little types of ironies happen?
for example, yesterday i was driving and listening to 89.9, our local classical music station, and my new car has a screen that tells me the song name and composer. it was a piece about water (probably why i was drawn to it in the first place) by ravel and had the word "barque" in the title. because it was translated from french to english, i learned that this is another name for "boat", as i had only been familiar with the french "bateau". but later the same day i was looking up something completely different and "barque" showed up again?! it was nice to know what it meant, but twice in one day for a word i'd never known...
i could blame the snow for having more time on my hands than usual, but another word coincidence happened today. perusing my bookshelves for good reads until i can get my novels from the library, i noticed i had shelved madeleine l'engle's book of poetry "the weather of the heart" next to a dylan thomas collection. i've never really read a lot of thomas, so i dusted it off and opened it at random. to, you guessed it, thomas' poem entitled, " a process in the weather of the heart". alert readers, i am not making this up.
life is like an onion--endless skins of connections. one can safely bet that l'engle would have known her thomas. but i didn't know that until today and they had been next to each other on the shelf the entire time.
people could argue from a cerebral cortex perspective that we expect to see what we are looking for, just like with the gratitude principle, that if you think great things are going to happen, they probably will. but what about these small ironies of the literary type?
for example, yesterday i was driving and listening to 89.9, our local classical music station, and my new car has a screen that tells me the song name and composer. it was a piece about water (probably why i was drawn to it in the first place) by ravel and had the word "barque" in the title. because it was translated from french to english, i learned that this is another name for "boat", as i had only been familiar with the french "bateau". but later the same day i was looking up something completely different and "barque" showed up again?! it was nice to know what it meant, but twice in one day for a word i'd never known...
i could blame the snow for having more time on my hands than usual, but another word coincidence happened today. perusing my bookshelves for good reads until i can get my novels from the library, i noticed i had shelved madeleine l'engle's book of poetry "the weather of the heart" next to a dylan thomas collection. i've never really read a lot of thomas, so i dusted it off and opened it at random. to, you guessed it, thomas' poem entitled, " a process in the weather of the heart". alert readers, i am not making this up.
life is like an onion--endless skins of connections. one can safely bet that l'engle would have known her thomas. but i didn't know that until today and they had been next to each other on the shelf the entire time.
people could argue from a cerebral cortex perspective that we expect to see what we are looking for, just like with the gratitude principle, that if you think great things are going to happen, they probably will. but what about these small ironies of the literary type?
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