Coincidence or Divinely Inspired Theme?

Some days four or five of us show up at the library wearing the same color. As we remark about this to each other, someone else will arrive, off-color so to speak, and we all round on her demanding, "Didn't you get the memo?"

The movie "Terms of Endearment" came out within a year after my sister died of breast cancer. The situations were eerily similar: young mother with three children and a clueless husband. My sister did not have a whacky, righteously angry mother who drove across the beach with an ex-astronaut, but that's why movies are never exactly like real life. My other sister, a cousin who was like a sister to us, and I all saw the movie on the same weekend, but not with each other. After I recovered from copious weeping at the end of the film, I could not wait to get home and call them to say, "Don't see this movie! It's too devastating; you shouldn't see it yet." What happened was that we all called each other to give the same warning.

A couple of years ago I re-read Josephine Tey's marvelous book, "The Daughter of Time," in which she makes the case that Richard the Third got a bad rap. She blames the general historical assumption about his bad character and physical deformity on Shakespeare, pointing out that it was, after all, in his best interest to set the Tudors in a good light and more or less cover up their own suspicious activities in the matter. So I went and re-read his "Richard the Third," wanting to examine it again with Tey's perspective fresh on my mind. I found I couldn't; his luscious language and keen dramatic instincts obliterated my intention, and he basically swept me away. Not a month later, I caught Al Pacino's documentary about preparing for the role, "Looking for Richard." And then a few weeks later I saw the movie starring Ian McKellen. Set in the 1930's, it is rife with fascist overtones. But my point is that I didn't seek these movies out--they were offered serendipitously as part of some weird literary theme just for me.

As Jerry Seinfeld might say, "What's THAT all about?"

Now my favorite blogger PJ (http://wordinthewoods.blogspot.com. Check it out.) has just posted about a family dinner conversation about T.S. Eliot. This morning I opened the next book I'm going to read, Val McDermid's "The Torment of Others," and found this quotation from "The Four Quartets" as the introduction:

"But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides."

Is another literary theme about to thread its way around me? I don't know, but I'm feeling an overwhelming urge to stop everything and pick "The Complete Works of T.S. Eliot" from my bookshelf and let this take me where it leads.