Enter Label: Seeing double with Italo Calvino and Camus

and a brief shout out to probability

Dear Companions,

Something happened that, as a consequence, emancipated me from the obligatory birthday post I was drafting. Stuffed with words like Kristelnacht and kaleidoscope, the post was becoming a bit insufferable. As torturous to finish, as it would have been gratuitous for you to read. I’m glad we avoided that.

Instead, I share with you a little poetic interlude of life, a strange synchronicity of events, like an astrological conspiracy—a flow so at odds with probability, it can only be classified as magic. In fact it’s the second time something like this has happened to me, and the odds of that, as I calculate, painstakingly, below, turns out to be a very, very small number.

The confluence, twice

Last Saturday, I went back to the city by way of the Jitney bus. This was my first time in a lengthy public ride building from this subway ride, thus marking my further reimmersion into the general population, to the resounding chorus of joyous farts of people who have long forgot things like Covid and Long Covid judging by the way that my mask was received, as well as the extra seat I had purchased. Two days later I got the quarterly round of injections for my head pain and sulked to the the health food store to recover.

Still, in my carry along for nearly three months, was the book, My Struggle, Volume 2. Typically when a book takes a long time to read, I abandon it. Not necessarily due to a flaw, but simply because too much time lapsed, or too many other books interloped between the sheets. The pages now yellowed, bent, and worn from traveling to different spots on my healing journey: Doctors appointments, strange spiritual practices, breakfast spots, the passenger car seat, the bathroom floor... But aren’t books the perfect companion in a recovery journey? Stable, light, and all-seeing. Reliable even if they are tended to haphazardly, and this one was no different.

I take notes in the margins. Unknowingly, it was my first dip into the magic, the flow soon to occur. An author’s words become mine...

A discussion between the characters on poetry compelled me to move forward with the opus. In one part of a discussion with a friend, Knausgaard makes the case against poetry.

“You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound. How many people do you think can do that? How many writers do you think spend their time touching up their modernist poems, with three words on each page? It’s because they have no other option….!”

I wondered if I agreed with that sentiment. Take for example the Away Messages I used to post on Facebook all the time. A kind of poetry? Or a nuisance? Often a heated debate for me.

Many many many Away Messages like that since 1999

Then Knausgaard just as swiftly articulated the case in favor of poetry, describing his Communist uncle:

“More significant by far for my image of [my uncle] was the fact that he wrote poetry. Not because I was fond of poetry, but “because of what it “said” more about him. You didn’t write poems if you didn’t have to, that is, unless you were a poet.”

You had to earn the right to read them. How? It was simple. You opened a book, read, and if the poems opened themselves up to you, you had the right, and if not, you didn’t.

He was right in both. There is a vanity and superficiality in poetry. But poetry is also compulsion, an urge to communicate a feeling. As a reader, few understand the masterpieces. I thought of a compromise. Perhaps the healthy me is a non poet, but the one in the Healingvrse is a poet.

Knausgaard went on to talk to about poetic construction in Butterfly Valley by Christension, and in If on a Winters Night a Traveler written by Italo Calvino. I had never heard of either of these authors, and my mind drifted. I stared out the window. Dogs. Women in flip flops. Upper East Side ladies. People still having fun smoking.

Then a thought popped into my head. More like a memory about Books and Records— a vague idea I have shared with family and friends to start a bookstore and social club for brooders, self healers, and soul searchers. I searched Google for inspiration, to see if there was a community for writers in the new town I just moved to in the Hamptons. The first search result was The Writers Cooperative. I clicked in.

From the first paragraph I learned that there was indeed a group that once gathered in the Library in town, but had now moved to the backyard of one of its members. The group consisted of about 20 people or so, and recorded some portions of their weekly gatherings for people to follow virtually.

And then lightening!

In the middle of the website’s page I saw these words:

Last week, we read from an Italo Calvino short story from his collection…

Calvino.

I glazed over it minutes ago, but the name was so familiar.

Had I just read about Calvino in Knausgaard?

No, I’m sure not. I imagined it was close but not exactly Calvino, maybe Columbo, I guessed, while thumbing back the few pages in the Knausgaard book. But lo and behold, there it was, the name, the exact same author referenced. I looked up from my book, to the site, and back again, tracing the letters C-a-l-v-i-n-o. A dead match.

I looked around the cafe as if someone else caught it too. What are the sheers odds of that happening, of finding Calvino in the book and moments later on some random site? Sure if it were Victor Frankl it would be surprising, but not that surprising. He can be found everywhere in the Healingvrse. Even Bob Barker has shown up in a few spots (did you know he got massages everyday?).

But Calvino? In a book by a Norwegian guy? On a website in Long Island? I asked my dad, a Renaissance man by all accounts, if he had heard of him, and he said that he had, that this was a famous Italian author, but he had never read him.

And then I remembered! This was not the first time I had such an experience. Nearly 15 years ago an eerily similar thing happened. I was caught up in the 2009 recession, just passed the NY bar, and hating the limited job offers coming in.

I remember watching a B-list movie called the Passion of Ayn Rand starring Helen Mirren, as it has this unusually large impact on me. The film, or I suppose Ayn Rand, inspired me to think more entrepreneurially. I printed business cards and headed to a conference, dropping the title lawyer. From there I worked with a startup. An embarassing move. I was supposed to be making 100 grand that year, and here I was working for kids younger than me…for free.

But on the subject of the magic—in the film, there was this incredible quote that I had not heard of until then belonging to Camus. It was was the best-known existentialist question in the opening salvo of The Myth of Sisyphus:

“There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”.

Later that day, I went to Barnes and Nobles with the specific intention of selecting a few books to inspire the next part of my life. I selected three books: Tom Robbin’s Still Life of Woodpecker, Bulgakov’s Master and the Margherita, and one by Philip Roth (the book title escapes me). I brought them home, munched on snacks, and dusted the crumbs off my hands. The first book I picked to read was Robbin’s.

And then it happened.

There on the first page was a version of the exact same Camus quote, but with a Robbin’s twist:

“Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.

Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.

Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.

There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?

Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.”

Magic. Pure unadulterated, mundane magic in a merciless and unpredictable year, that gave me this feeling that I was on the right track, despite all the markers indicating otherwise. If Camus was speaking to me from the grave, he was saying, now is the time to be bold.

A couple of years later, I wrote that same Camus quote on a birthday post of my now spouse’s Facebook wall. To this day he says reading that post was one of those moments in which he realized he loved me. We now have a kid together. Can I credit, in some infinitesimal part, the improbable confluence of events?

Over the years, I tried on rare occasion to share that Camus story with people, but it never landed. I guess I couldn’t figure out how to explain the significance. Perhaps the part about the odds was missing.

So back to now.

I had to get my hands on that Calvino book. It was urgent. I could not wait for Amazon. Shipping could interrupt the flow, the message the universe wanted to tell me. I went to the only bookstore near me, the only one I was willing to walk to on a hot and humid summer day with my head all pierced by needles—a small Shakespeare and Co, with very little hope it would be there.

Here I was, ten years later, much deeper in the hole, drilled twice by a sickness, looking for clues, again, to my life, in a bookstore. Perhaps no longer in a suicidal depression as last summer, but still living in desperation, always clinging on to a promise for homeostasis, or a future with a clean bill of health.

At the store, I asked for the author, Calvino, and the book “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”. The lady keyed a few things into the computer, and then said, “We have one copy.” How shocking! This was a shoebox of a bookstore. This time of the year it was often only stocked with top Beach Reads or required summer school classics. Moreover, I had showed up that store many times before, seeking more well-known books, and they usually never had them, like, not even Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, arguably the best book of one of America’s top authors.

The lovely Calvino book with a cover of a doodle of the reader electrified, absorbed

Still murmuring to myself at my surprise, I retrieved the book from the lady at the desk and rushed home (well I stopped for a snack). As I dusted the crumbs off my palms, again, I opened it, anxious to read if there were any more clues inside. The book started with an unusual preface directed to the reader.

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

Relax.

Concentrate.

Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.

Best to close the door…Tell the others right away, “No I don’t to watch TV!”

And then, as if speaking directly to me, Calvino addressed a zeal in my heart.

“You are the sort of person who on principle, no longer expects anything of anything….

Precisely because you have denied it in every other belief, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books,

where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.”

Perhaps one of the best synopsis for reading, why Away Messages, and the Healingvrse, has so many books referenced. The preface continued discussing different kinds of books that one encounters in life:

Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages

Books Dealing With Something You’r Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want to Own so They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books you Could put aside Maybe TO Read This Summer

The Books that Need To Go with Other Books On your Shelves

The Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified…

And then a few pages later, the actually story begins, which I won’t get in to today because the meaning of the synchronicity was clear, the lesson drawn from the preface and by simply having the author in my hand. And here are the few key points as I see them, dear Companion.

The Odds (a calculation)

First am I exaggerating my surprise? Is this silly? Is this a signal that my life has become too reductionist at the moment. What are the actual odds of these two events happening? Because they have to be very very small for me to call them magic right?

Well let’s start with the double Calvino. My Dad had heard of Calvino, but never read him. That put the author squarely in the tier two or tier three of all published authors in say, the past 50 years. I asked ChatGPT how many published authors it approximated in the past 50 years globally. It replied with:

“Considering the global population growth, increased accessibility to publishing platforms, and the expansion of the literary industry over the past 50 years, it's possible that there have been several hundred thousand to millions of published authors worldwide during this time period.”

So I sliced it down to the lower range, and put the odds of finding Calvino in a list of one in 300,000 authors. My dad reminded me to think about a few parameters in making the calculation:

1. What’s the probability of encounter the name in the book if you randomly look in the book.

2. What’s the probability to encounter the name on web page if you randomly have one look in the internet.

3. What is probability of encounter the same name in both the book and the web page after you had one look into the book and into the internet (called joint probability).

4. What’s the probability of encounter the name on the random web page PROVIDED that you encountered that name after one random look in the book (called conditional probability)

For number 1, I ascribed the probability of Calvino being in the Knausgaard book as 1/300,000. The same goes for the East. Hampton Writer’s Collective’s website which probably reviewed all types of authors weekly. Again, 1/300,000. To answer number #3, the joint probability of both of these things occurring, the odds of finding Calvino in both the book AND the website back-to-back would be 1/300,000 * 1/300,000 or one in 90 billion. Winning the Powerball jackpot, 1 in 292 million in 2021, was a lot more probable by this calculation!

Number 4, or the conditional probability, did not apply here because in this case, the two events are correctly assumed to be independent from one another. The book was written by Knausgaard somewhere in Norway or Sweden, and the website by some chap probably using SquareSpace out in East Hampton.

So what about the odds of this entire event happening to me twice, if you account for the Camus incidence ten years prior. And furthermore, does the fact that I go through intense periods of reading increase the odds of this happening to me?

Well first, the odds of the Camus story are different because indeed Camus is more popular than Calvino. Let’s say his probability of showing up in a movie is 1/10,000. Followed by a book, another 1/10,000. So the chances of the Camus magic happening is 1/100 million.

But what about the frequency of reading? In 20 years, assume I read for 7300 days. At the beginning of my life estimate the probability of the double event first with Camus then with Calvino over the period of 20 years to be calculated as follows:

How many day pairs are in 20 years? Answer: approximately 7300 x 7300 /2, or 26,704,500.

Choose any pair of this 26,704,500. The probability of having Camus show up twice in two different places on one day and Calvino show up twice in two different places on the second day is 1/100M x 1/90B.

So the total probability is

.5 x 7300 x 7300 x 1/100M x 1/90B

First, let's simplify the multiplication:

.5 * 7300 * 7300 = 26,645,000

Then substitute it back in:

26,645,000 * 1/1,000,000 * 1/90,000,000,000

This further simplifies to:

26.645 * 1/90,000,000,000 = 0.0000000002959444

So the result of the probability calculation is approximately 2.959444 * 10^-10, or 0.0000000002959444.

The decimal 0.0000000002959444 expressed as a percentage would be:

0.0000000002959444 * 100 = 0.00000002959444%

That’s a very, very, very small number. One might call it negligible. I call it magic.

The Point

In the Healingvrse, we are often searching for a purpose for the pain we endure. While I’m improving so very slowly, my situation still wreaks a havoc on my life, and requires me to deal with many demons, feelings of isolation that I would not wish on any young mother. I’ve thought: Perhaps to defeat pain you need to experience a lot of it? But that is an an unsatisfactory answer still.

The magic of the Calvino does not answer the question of why I am going through this all entirely, but it does speak to one half of the equation—it speaks to the fact that maybe, again, I’m in the right place, at the right time. How else could these improbable event have occurred? The Calvino me connecting to the Camus me creates a kind of unity to my story. If I’m in the right place at the right time, then the purpose will show itself to me eventually. It is the only natural conclusion. Just as you know that when the sun is up in the sky, you have just as surely found proof it will go down—it is the only way to progress forward.

But also something else. It occurs to me that all this time reading books, often alone, I forget that fact that the words belong to other people. When reading books, I read by the voice in my own head. It becomes all too easy to feel that their words have become mine as I noted in the margins, in my Knausgaard book.

But when this kind of electric connection happens, you remember other people, as simple and troubled, write these words, other people who endure suffering daily at certain periods in life, how else can they render references and feelings that intertwine in such synchronous ways. These writers are aligned under the same constellation of dying and dead stars. Alone is never alone in the Healingvrse.

So I hope for us, that I have written something, if even accidental in this post, a past past, or future, that somehow, unintentionally, gets woven into the fabric of your life, your thoughts, ideas, yes perhaps, by sheer dumb luck, by beating the odds, but should it happen, proves to you that you are never alone in the Healingvrse. We are in this together, we are here for a reason, and we will get better.

As I arrive at the end of this, I only have two more questions. First, I wonder if this mundane magic will ever occur again in my lifetime. Will I care as much? Will I catch it?

And second, is there any who has read this, who has had something like this happen to them too? I’m so curious if people experience these things, if it matters to them. If it has, please share it. Do you feel comfortable calling it a magic?

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca