The sound of serendipity

If the title reminds you of yesterday's column, it is because they are actually strongly related. While researching the article (because, even if they sometimes look like the random rant of a hallucinated mind, I always to support my opinions on facts, so I have to document myself) I found a piece of information that was too good not to write about it, because if illustrates perfectly the concept of serendipity and how likely we are to become what we have become.

It turns out that "Wednesday Morining, 3 A.M.", the debut album of Simon & Garfunkel, which contained the original version of "The Sound of Silence" and was released in October 1964 was such a commercial flop that the duo was disbanded. Paul Simon moved to London in January 1965 and Art Garfunkel returned to his studies at Columbia University in New York City. Inexplicably, the song started to gain traction among college students, particularly in the East Coast, and the producer, Tom Wilson, without telling anything to the artists, re-recorded the song with studio musicians and released it again by September of the same year to great commercial success. According to the biography written by Marc Eliot, When Simon heard the new version he was "horrified", but I guess he welcomed the opportunity to get back together with Garfunkel to lead a very successful musical career thereafter.

Photo: QuoteInspector

I wanted to point out this story because it would have been very easy for Dick Summer (the late-night DJ who allegedly brought the song to the public attention) to pick just any other song that night, and Simon & Garfunkel would have never been what they became. But that is not a rare case: if we look into the matter honestly, as Ali Binazir does in this article, the chances of my father getting to know my mother were astronomically slim, let alone getting married; and when I was conceived, it was again by the serendipitous coincidence of a sperm and the egg, it could have happened any other day and then I would be a different person. But if we transfer the reasoning one generation earlier, the number of coincidences that had to happen for my father and my mother to be exactly who they are, are equally dizzying. It is true that, if anything had gone different they would probably have been born anyway, but the chances are that they would be slightly different. I would say that their chances of meeting as different people would have been even more remote, and then I would not be writing these lines.

On the opposing side, the theory of multiple discoveries posits that scientific progress happens in an almost inevitable way in the midst of a society whenever it is ready: it has to control the necessary prerequisite technologies and it has to have a need, a problem to solve that can only be addressed by discovering a new process or inventing a new tool. One remarkable example is the development of writing, which happened in several places around the world, with completely different solutions and at slightly different points in time, but always in societies with roughly the same state of development: when the bureaucracy of the early agrarian states became complex enough that the ledgers of production and consumption could not just be kept in the minds of a few people, the different societies invented (or copied) methods to keep track of them in a physical medium.

Does this mean that "The Sound of Silence" was destined for glory one way or another, that if it had not been by Dick Summer any other DJ would have eventually played it in their radio station and brought the duo back from oblivion? It is possible, but I seriously doubt it. In that direction, I have recently read a commentary of the movie Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle, which I found intriguing. A musician wakes up after an accident and finds out that nobody else knows or has ever heard of a band called "The Beatles". The movie revolves about the success he achieves when he starts to play their songs, which he knew all by heart because he was an avid fan before the accident. I have not had the time to watch it yet and I would not like to spoil it either, but the subtext of the movie is that the songs were so good that they were an inescapable success. Is it so? Again, I doubt it. I strongly believe that much of the success of The Beatles was due to the environment in which they evolved and if someone came with their songs today they would not be by far as successful as they were in their time.

So next time to run into a pleasant surprise, have a narrow miss with the car or run into an old-time acquaintance, keep in mind that life is made of fortuitous combinations that make us who we are. I hope you have a nice and lucky evening.