Glacial Errata, Vol. 2

One: A Story Involving Jake LaMotta, Two Plane Crashes, and Priceless Artwork

On June 16, 1949, Jake LaMotta, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s film Raging Bull, defeated Marcel Cerdan to win the World Middleweight title. A rematch was arranged, but on October 28 of that same year, Cerdan, flying from Paris to New York for the rematch (as well as to meet his lover, Edith Piaf), was killed when the Lockheed Constellation he was traveling in crashed into a mountain while attempting to land in the Azores for a planned refueling stopover. Cerdan and 47 other people were killed, including the 30 year-old violinist Ginette Neveu. Neveu, on her way to begin a North American tour that would include a performance at Carnegie Hall, was carrying with her a priceless Stradivarius violin, built in 1730 by Antonio Stradivari’s son, Omobono, which was also lost in the crash.

Two: A Story Involving Jake LaMotta, Two Plane Crashes, and Priceless Artwork, Continued

Almost forty years later, on September 2, 1988 (the day before my birthday), SwissAir Flight 111, traveling from JFK in New York City to Geneva, Switzerland, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Nova Scotia, Canada, killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew onboard, the crash a result of a fire that broke out in the air conditioning system. Among the passengers was Jake LaMotta’s son, Joseph LaMotta. The plane was also carrying Pablo Picasso’s painting, Le Peintre, which was lost forever.

Three: Littlewood’s Law

Is this coincidence noteworthy? Is it significant that one individual should be associated with two separate plane crashes, each of which involved, beyond the tragic loss of life, the destruction of a priceless and irreplaceable work of art? Perhaps.

Or Perhaps coincidence—originally a French word first introduced to English readers by Sir Thomas Browne, who noted in a 1655 letter what a remarkable coincidence it was that so many people happen to die on the same day they are born, and who himself would die on October 19, 1682, his 77th birthday—is less remarkable than we think. The British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood suggested that what we perceive of as coincidence is really just the obscure workings of statistics, and that an occurrences with a million-to-one odds may happen far more often than we think.

Consider bridge. While being dealt a hand of 13 cards all of the same suit in the game of bridge may seem wildly improbable (in fact, Littlewood calculated the probability at 2.4 × 10^-9 ), and thus impossibly unlikely, one must remember that how many millions of hands of bridge have been played, are being played, will be played at any given moment, so that being dealt such a hand, while incredible in the span of one’s own life, may in fact be quite predictable given the total number of hands of bridge dealt to all the many players of the game. Perhaps what we think of as extraordinary coincidences, Littlewood suggests, are in fact a failure to understand a larger world beyond ourselves, or beyond the singular individuals that we too often fixate on.

Four: W. G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald, who wrote extensively about not just coincidence but also Sir Thomas Browne, as well as the way the endless string of tragedies and calamities we experience make up what we call history—and whose tragic death in December of 2001 makes the interviews he gave earlier that fall, while on a book tour for Austerlitz, all the more precious, as those are some of the last words we have by him—offered, on September 3, 2001 (my birthday, as it happens) the following remarks about coincidence in a conversation with Joe Cuomo:

“I don’t particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more…and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn’t, as we all know.”

Five: Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Consider this bridge. Would the Silver Memorial Bridge have the same resonance, the same strange mystery that draws thousands of visitors to Point Pleasant, West Virginia every year, if not for the tragic circumstances that destroyed its predecessor on December 15, 1967 and the bizarre coincidence that, in the year before the original Silver Bridge collapsed, there were numerous sightings of a strange creature—most likely a heron—that led many people to believe that a hitherto unknown cryptid, Mothman, was in fact trying to warn people of an impending disaster? Do we turn, in other words, to coincidence, and to the idea that there might be some mystical, supernatural element behind everything that we can only glimpse, not because there is any truth to the matter, but because it offers a way of coping with tragedies and disaster that we cannot predict or control, and can only, in their wake, search around for some kind of pattern by which we might retroactively make sense of them?