I stumble across a billboard with the following words: Zadig & Voltaire … Opening Soon. A pair of angel wings interpose the two phrases along the vertical. A blond seductress, attired in ivory leather unbuttoned at the top, vaunts a white, disproportionally sized handbag across the chest, or so the somewhat incongruent background composition leads me to believe.
But Zadig? Get out of town! Voltaire’s lesser known pseudo-historical fiction only recently joined my reading backlog next to the likes of Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, Beckfords’s Vathek and probably Schwob’s Vies Imaginaires. (I’d sooner read the former’s Ogniem i Mieczem, but the sheer volume makes it an intractable travel article in most conceivable bindings.)
I gather one in a million has even heard of Zadig. And perhaps that’s the intent behind the striking words, warranting their originality to the beholder. Some algorithm operated exceptionally well. And chance happened to cast my eyesight in that direction I virtually never gaze, less read billboard inscriptions.
Murphy’s law, right? Right. Advertising intelligence, human or artificial, whips up names and slogans from the most obscure sources all the fleeting time. Millions of persons glance across them, or through them, daily, without a second thought. Simple probability dictates that some clever bastard will eventually make an inference. The same mathematics also near guarantees that any arbitrary person will stumble across some bizarre phenomenon of personal significance here and there, if even once per lifetime.
If it wasn’t for Zadig & Voltaire, it would’ve been the waiter by the name of Cupidus working the diner, a crow superimposed over the lunar eclipse, a cloud formation depicting the imagery of your surname, a scorpion tracing the path to Solomon’s tomb, or your Hassidic folk legend of choice.
Questions, comments? Connect.