Richard Boyle, quoting a letter from Horace Walpole in 1754, referring to an ancient fairytale:
“I once read a silly fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand serendipity? ….accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description)…”
*****
Serendipity: the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident; serendipitous finds are necessarily valuable and made while looking for something else.
Sagacity: the quality of being discerning, sound in judgment, and farsighted; wisdom.
*****
Know how you wander around blogs, hopping from one place to another until you find that you can’t trace back how you got to where you are? And on occasion, you happen upon a space that you just love? You find it, even though you are not looking for it. That’s serendipity.
It is my hope to create a space here, that when someone stumbles upon it, they consider it a happy and unexpected discovery. I want it to be comfortable, soothing, inspirational.
*****
Louis Pasteur : “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” {Photography is a field of observation, wouldn’t you say?} Or, more commonly, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And, as William Shakespeare expressed it about 250 years earlier in act 4 of his play Henry V: “All things are ready if our minds be so.”
4 comments