THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 6, 1996 TAG: 9604060001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
Synchronicity that crazy experience in which coincidence seems almost out of this world - continues to break into my life. And recently the phenomenon took on an amazing added dimension.
Up till now, the encounters, as I wrote in an earlier piece, involved astounding but pretty straightforward juxtapositions. I would be reading a news story and my eyes would light on some fairly infrequent word, say, ``aggregate.'' And at just that moment, or a little before or a little after, someone on TV would enunciate that very word.
The most remarkable thing, in my own acquaintance with such dualities, was how often they occurred and caught my attention. I've felt it was all quite weird, to say the least, even after reading various rational assertions that the odds weren't really stacked against these twinnings.
Now I have something new, synchonicity-wise, to wonder about.
The other day I was working on a word puzzle, a double-crostic, something which can both enlighten and enliven. But this time I snagged badly when this definition appeared for a 12-letter word: ``Gr. scholar (c275-c195 B.C.) credited with measuring earth's circumference.''
Well, I had only a fuzzy recollection, from some school history class, about a Greek genius who did just that. But his name? No wrinkle in my gray cells retained the faintest hint.
I have no qualms about looking up things to move word puzzles along, and I would readily have tried that route in this case. But how do you find documentary information on a 12-letter ancient like this one unless you take the problem to a full library? In the references I have at home, there are no indexes to ``Greek mathematicians'' or ``early Mediterranean feats of logic'' or ``first calculations of global girth'' or ``Earth, accurate measurements of'' or anything like that.
Enter sheer, spooky coincidence.
That puzzle was still around the house, pored over fretfully every few days but still unworked, when I happened to be reading a book I had started well before the puzzle. The volume was one of my borrowings from friends Bud and Jennette Franklin. The title was Empires Ascendant, one of the Time-Life series, and dealt with the 600-year period ending in 200 A.D. And there, on Page 35, this leaped out at me in a paragraph dealing with Hellenistic Alexandria. It was noted that the geometer Euclid lived there and:
``So did Eratosthenes, who calculated the circumference of the earth by the shadows of sticks (he came within 15 percent of the actual distance).''
There it was! I'd found it! Eureka! (Using the exclamation of that other, more easily researched Greek, the specific-gravity man, Archimedes.)
The 12 letters of Eratosthenes went into my crostic, breaking the puzzle's back; I soon had all the other words.
So this was a case where synchronicity went beyond the merely curious, and became useful.
Now that's something to think about. And worth tapping into more frequently. If only I could. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB