On Serendipity

ON SERENDIPITY

Sven Birkerst is the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is the author of The Gutenberg Elegies, and, more recently, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (2015) and The Other Walk: Essays (2011). 

Christopher Benfey

is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. His latest book is The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years (2019). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Edited by Sam Dresser

Since we first met some 20 years ago, my friend the writer Christopher Benfey and I have had innumerable long conversations, many of which revolved around the topics of chance, coincidence and serendipity. These conversations were themselves serendipitous, often moving from one shared associative convergence to another. At some point, we remarked on this fact, but it was some time before we hit on the idea of a written conversation. We decided to try; we wanted to see if a regular to-and-fro would leave an interesting trail.

What started as a casual private exchange between friends soon enough gathered momentum. Not surprisingly, Benfey and I found ourselves taking up all sorts of topics – writing, photography, important mentors, getting older – but inevitably we would come circling back to those keyword themes. All in all, we had 100 exchanges (we agreed to that number as a cap), though when we ‘finished’, we saw how arbitrary that limit really was. We could have kept on writing, widening the search and pushing deeper on all of our topics. What follows are several excerpts from the middle part of our dialogue./.../