Oddly coincident events

Of course you know the difference between what we call 'real life' and fiction.  Fiction has a human mind, sometimes more than one, behind it.  That human mind has a history, awareness and taste.  I don't say 'good taste'.  I mean it has intuition about what will make the story serve the purpose of the author(s).  Often, that purpose has to do with money, with making sales, maybe selling the rights to the fiction as a screenplay or a tv series.  The author might have different or multiple purposes, though, including simple direct fun or artistic originality or an interest in depicting something in what seems a new way.

We often hear that truth is stranger than fiction.  In many ways, that seems to be true, often we hear of some rather strange event or rare or improbable occurrence.  Such words indicate the connection between probability and believability.  If something is too improbable, we have difficulty believing that it happened or even could happen.  We understand that strange events do happen by themselves, often in the area of co-incidents.  When I happen to pick up the phone to call you after no contact for a while and you are thinking at the very same moment that I owe you a call, that is a coincidence that gets our attention.  Last week, I wrote about the movie "Harold and Maude" in discussing attitudes toward life and toward death.  It turned out that relatives 1000 miles away had chosen that very movie to watch at that very time.  Wow, what a coincidence!

In some medieval and old plays, the climax includes a revelation that the delicious young hero is actually the long-lost heir to the throne and a prince of the realm, giving him even more shine and worth as a prize for the delicious young heroine.  Modern audiences often break out into laughter, exclaiming,"Yeah, right.  Like that could happen." Yet some very arresting coincidents do occur in life.  Sometimes, mere chance really does bring together elements that matter to us in ways that are very rare.  But generally, the mere simultaneous events are all that happens, not things that affect us all that much.  In the vocabulary of some time management people, there is a distinction between "urgent" [needs immediate action] and "important" [matters, has weighty consequences.  Similarly, we could say that most of the co-incidents in life are striking but not all that important.  In fiction, the co-incidents have a big effect on events.  In "Three Fugitives", Nick Nolte has just minutes ago been released from prison for bank robbery and is now in the bank to get some money when a novice bank robber, Martin Short, tries to rob the bank and takes the dangerous, wily and tired Nolte hostage.  What a coincidence!