Serendipity

Rating: 8/10 (3 March 2012)

Serendipity and synchronicity are the watchwords of my life. I love it when two elegant events come together in a single moment of time. The latest of these happenings occurred to me recently at the second viewing of the magnificent motion picture, Hugo, directed by Master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. I went to see this film the first time right after it came out at the AMC Multiplex in Hamilton, New Jersey with my partner Mary Lopez.
Hugo is a wonderful story taking place in a Parisian railway station in the early 20th century. Hugo's job is to keep all the clocks running in the station. He had taken over this job from his dipsomaniacal uncle who has disappeared. As a child, he has no business being in the railway station and but he secretly lives there and is constantly on the lookout for the railway inspector played with perfectly pitched panache by the brilliant Sacha Baron Cohen.
Hugo's quest is to repair an automaton which was found by his late father in a Parisian Museum. Hugo is constantly scavenging for parts for the automaton and searching for a heart shaped key that holds the answer to the inner workings of the automaton. Pursuing this quest, Hugo strikes up an acquaintance with the daughter a toy store owner in the railway station, Isabelle. During one of their little adventures together they are caught by the railway inspector who wants to nab Hugo and send him to an orphanage.
To distract the inspector's attention, Isabelle spouts off a bit of poetry:
My heart is like s singing bird
whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are hung with thick set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My hear is gladder than all these
Because my love is come back to me. The station inspector says that he likes poetry as much as the next fellow, but that poetry has no place in a railway station where his job is to see that the trains arrive and depart on time. I too like poetry as much as the next fellow, and while I thought the words to be lovely indeed, I did not attach any special significance to them. The movie continued on and I soon forgot about the bit of poetry that Isabelle recited.
Several weeks later while browsing through my favorite Princeton bookstore, The Labyrinth, I came across a lovely tome by written by Virginia Woolf entitled, "A Room of One's Own." I had never read this book and thought this would be an excellent opportunity to do so. Therefore, I purchased the book and took it home to read.
"If by chance there had been an ash tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out the window. If things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen a cat without a tail," or a book in a bin, with the title, "A Room of One's Own." In chapter one, Ms. Woolf mused about the murmurings people made before the war and could these humming sounds be set to words? She chanced to browse through a book and found these words by Tennyson:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion flower at the gate.
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"
And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"
And the lily whispers, "I wait." " Was this what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war?" she mused. "And what of the women?"
Here it is, wait for it:
My heart is like s singing bird
whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are hung with thick set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My hear is gladder than all these
Because my love is come back to me.
By now the reader may recognize these words written by Christina Rossetti spoken by the young heroine Isabelle in the movie, Hugo. However, at that time, I still had not made the connection between one and the other, thinking this was my first encounter with this precious piece of poetry.
Fast forward a few weeks into the future, now the past, while on a trip to my native land of Kentucky to visit my grandchildren, I took two of them to the movies where we went to see Hugo, which I thought they would enjoy. So we were sitting there in the dark wearing our special spectacles enjoying the 3-D effects when lo and behold we come to selfsame scene in the movie that I described before to the gentle reader about the poem declaimed by the girl Isabelle. My heart is like s singing bird
whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are hung with thick set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My hear is gladder than all these
Because my love is come back to me. Wow! Zing! Bing! Bang! It all came together in a clang. The first view of the movie, Hugo, the reading of the Virginia Woolf book, A Room of One's Own, and the second viewing of the Movie, Hugo, separated by time and space, crystallized in a frozen moment of synchronicity and serendipity, the universes suddenly came together in clarion call of harmonic vibration.