The last two essays I filled discussing a movie that I watched in a hotel room, trying to wind down after a long drive. I’ve made the long drive back home by now and come across this essay about chance, or more precisely Fortune. Montaigne leaves open the question of whether the tales he regales are the product of dumb luck or some type of Providence.

I would like to think that Montaigne is on the side of the random, but felt compelled by his times to make everything within the realm of Divine intervention. I suppose I could claim that this movie I watched just happening to fit perfectly into the spot of the last two essays could also be due to some kind of miracle on high — but that seems too absurd for me to consider. Two essays, unread by anyone as far as I know, created as part of some Divine plan. It would require far too much belief in my own importance in some universal scheme for me to grant it any weight.

But like Montaigne, I do enjoy when life seems to rhyme for reasons that cannot be explained. I am currently re-reading Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain,” (my third pass through it) and am struck by how personal the book feels to me this time. I am unlike the protagonist Hans Castrop and have never been to Switzerland, never mind a pre-World War I sanatorium, and yet, I feel like his narrative arc reaches a destination familiar to me.

To explain this would require me to go into far too much depth about a very complicated (700 plus page) novel, and I am not inclined to get into the weeds on this one. I’ll just say that Castrop develops into someone, during his 7 year stay at the sanatorium, who mediates the intellectual discussions and forms relationships with rival groups in much the same way I do. The Castrop at the end of the novel would have made a fine speechwriter.

I also envy him for being in the middle of European intellectual thought, where I feel far more comfortable than dwelling in what passes for intellectualism in America in this era. Americans would rather discuss football, real estate or crypto than anything that touches philosophy or literature. I write this blog mostly to pretend that there are Americans who care about the things I survey, hopeless as that may be.

But there is something that keeps me coming back and taking another look at matters observed many times by now. Time slows down during my voyages through Montaigne. The news becomes less important. I have a purpose that invites me onto side quests that align with my old master’s thoughts.

The bit of Fortune that matters most to me is that first experience, the decision to read and begin, not knowing then that it is less like a quest with a finite end date and more like Hans Castorp’s embedded stay among the sick and dying of a Europe about to change forever in the First World War.