Coincidence is the flip side of fate

Edwin Johns’s claim that coincidence is fate’s reverse side recasts chance as more than an interruption in an otherwise ordered world. In his account, coincidence is a form of total freedom, indifferent to laws and to the human desire for redemption; its senselessness is also the condition through which events and people enter into communion.

The Claim in Conversation

The expression emerges in a conversation with Piero Morini, who asks whether coincidence is a luxury. Johns answers that it is not: it is fate’s reverse side, and something further. Morini’s follow-up prompts Johns to explain the thought by contrasting his absent or estranged friend’s belief in humanity, order, redemption, and perhaps progress with his own account of coincidence.

Coincidence as Freedom

Johns describes coincidence as total freedom and as humanity’s natural destiny. It obeys no laws—or, if it does, those laws remain unknown. His comparison to a manifestation of God at every moment makes chance at once pervasive and radically unlike a providential order: this is a senseless God making senseless gestures toward senseless creatures. Coincidence does not supply a hidden plan that would redeem disorder; it names the disorder itself as the condition of existence.

Effect and Communion

The expression does not stop at randomness. Johns connects coincidence with effect, then connects effect with human beings: in the hurricane and osseous implosion of chance, he says, people find communion. That movement makes the idea deliberately paradoxical. Events may be senseless and governed by no intelligible law, yet they produce consequences and bind people into a shared condition. Fate and coincidence are therefore not simple opposites; their relation opens onto the unpredictable effects through which lives touch.

Dramatic and Thematic Context

The saying is delivered during Johns’s monologue, with Pelletier and Espinoza present and Morini listening. As Pelletier helps a nurse find the beginning of a story by Benno von Archimboldi, the scene briefly places literary order and careful reading beside Johns’s distrust of order in words and painting. The poised, gallant gesture and the advancing evening do not resolve his argument; they sharpen the contrast between deliberate arrangement and the shadows that seem to create new, unstable shapes.

Morini’s next question, why Johns mutilated himself, gives the discussion an immediate personal edge. The passage does not provide the answer in this moment, but it places the question beside Johns’s account of freedom, consequence, and senselessness. The expression thus serves both as an argument about the structure of existence and as a charged frame for approaching the artist’s self-mutilation: a search for intelligible purpose confronts a speaker who has just denied that events need obey one.