I've been thinking today about synchronicity and co-incidence. I'll tell a story that happened to me.

My mom was a librarian & one day a while back showed me that the New York Times had put up all of their old papers online. So we explored it by doing a search for Bob Dylan.1/

It was interesting to notice that most of the articles were written by the same guy- someone who had found him before he was known. We guessed he was the NYT Bob Dylan guy & we saw that he also wrote about other rock music. 2/

It was interesting how he was using phrases like "voice of a generation" as early as his first two articles in the early 60s. Clearly he had crafted a lot of the narrative Dylan Dealt with. We wondered aloud if we'd found "Mr. Jones" 3/

So I was playing around with the archive and I started reading an issue from 1856. It was so interesting I decided I would just keep reading a couple a day. I kept that up for about a year. 4/

At first it was novel language and terms, but it quickly became understandable and even normal. In the same way that reading the new daily shapes your perception of an era, this did too. I started to have the feeling of the time in me: the new states, abolition rising 5/

social conflicts and division. I felt the anticipation and anger around the dread scot case. the whole time there was this looming sense of something in the air. it was different than a documentary or an historical fiction: there was no sense of knowing the war was coming. 6/

I ended up stopping because the news filled me so much that I started having the sense of the people around me being unaware of the news. So it was an interesting feeling.

Strangely enough the last two years have had a similar sense. 7.

a few years later I picked up a copy of Bob Dylan's autobiography. It's actually really good. At one point he talks about being an unemployed folk singer wanting to write his own songs based on the harrowing child ballads that he heard in the smithsonian collection. 8

so he went to the New York Public Library and started reading, chronologically, the New York Times 1850s-1860s to get a sense of what it felt like to be in that era.

I couldn't believe it! 9/9

thanks for your attention for this non-soil-or-chestnut story

It's not that interesting just weird symmetry