A year ago my grandmother-in-law got me a book on my wish list as a Christmas gift. The book was Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five: The Children's Crusade." Vonnegut tells the story of the World War II firebombing of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut was there as an American P.O.W. in an underground bunker. He was among just a few to survive the horrendous fire storm that killed more civilians in one night than the atomic bomb did in Hiroshima. Worse, Dresden had no strategic or tactical value. It was a massacre with no military purpose. It was an excellent yet sobering read.
A few days later as I was pondering what to read next I picked up a book on our shelf that belongs to Kimberly. The book was "Disturbing the Universe" by Freeman Dyson. I had vaguely heard of Dyson and never heard much about the book. It was required reading for one of her SNU science classes back in college. I just picked it up by chance.The book is written by a world-reknowned scientist discussing the philosophy of modern science. I found the first two chapters engrossing and then I was stunned as I hit the third chapter. The third chapter was entitled "The Children's Crusade." Dyson writes about his experience as a scientist attached with the same bombing division that bombed Dresden in World War II. He said he always wanted to write a book about Dresden but that Vonnegut had beaten him to the punch and done a better job than he could have done. The third chapter of Dyson's book discusses Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in length.
I was amazed. I had just read Slaughterhouse Five...a book that I had received a year earlier but only just picked up to read a few weeks ago. And I picked up Dyson's book by sheer accident. Was this mere coincidence? These types of coincidences have happened several times in the past year in my reading choices. Sometimes I purposely read several books that investigate a certain theme. But in the past year I have found several of my reading choices linked and yet I had chosen them randomly...often receiving them as gifts from others and not of my own volition. Is somebody trying to tell me something?
I will expound on my new theory of cosmic dialogue in an upcoming entry. But I often wonder...am I subconsciously linking certain themes together? Or am I being led into certain directions of intellectual introspection by some outside force, i.e. God? Or is it all chance that I'm led down these paths of enlightenment? I'll write more about this later as this entry is beginning to ramble incoherently on subjects quite esoteric. But it kinda makes me wonder. And wondering is good.
