On a recent BBC Radio 4 show, 'Last Bus to Serendip' Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk) discussed serendipity (her blog runs some stuff on it here and here as well). Serendipity being that delightful learning moment or moment of discovery, encounter or chance meeting that can change the course of your life. That happy accident we've nearly all had. We're all like lightning conductors to everyone else's lightning. The term was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th Century man of letters who created the word after the Three Princes of Serendip who made great discoveries whether through chance or sagacity.
Aleks Krotoski explored serendipity its role and effect in building networked knowledge and fuelling combinatorial creativity. She asked the poet Richard Price, "Do you think about serendipity during the creative process and when writing poetry?" He responded by explaining the two types of serendipity. The first kind of serendipity:
"Very much so. There are two kinds of serendipity for poets. One is serendipity of influence. A good example is, I'm in a second hand book shop in Brighton. I come across the biography of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and I'm very taken by his WW1 poetry. 15 years later, I'm working on my last book 'Small World' which is just about parenthood. There is no connection there. Yet Apollinaire's style - that became really careful for 'Small World'."Aleks interjected: "The reason why people talk about libraries as sources of serendipity is that 2 books next to one another could have completely different topics but could bump well against one another. But you're talking about war and parenthood - some people may not see the connection. To be able to see that connection is quite a skill."
"Maybe but it's also to do with the industrial process of reading tonnes and tonnes of things."
