Punctual Chance – 12/13/2019

Das ding an sich.  I read this in a novel this past week and thought I, as a product of a Jesuit education, should understand its meaning.  We were fed many philosophies as part of our well-rounded education.  Then, on the same day, as chance would have it, in another novel, The Pale King, I came across the same phrase applied to the paradox of kissing one’s own lips.  (Why would that come up in a novel about the IRS?)  But I digress.  The point is that this reminded me of another time while reading Agape Agape by William Gaddis that I came across a passage concerning a Mr. Jones applying for a job at a honky-tonk nightclub.  The ensuing dialogue is exactly the same as the dialogue first seen and read, by me anyway, in A Confederacy of Dunces.  Which I had just reread.  (Gaddis does give full credit to Toole, though some people say that John Kennedy Toole is just a pseudonym used by Walker Percy.  So should he give credit to Walker Percy?)  Anyway, on that same page, in the Agape Agape novel, Gaddis is talking about the “unswerving punctuality of chance.”  This may seem like a bit of foofaraw but things like this blow me away.  Not like it is anything magical or spiritual, I’m sure it can be explained with the theory of large numbers or probability, but it’s kind of cool when it unexpectedly jumps out at you.  Even if it is just the thing in itself.

Peas and Hominy