ABSTRACT
The new name is Sri Lanka, but Ceylon was once called Serendip, and there was an Indian fable entitled “Three Princes from Serendip” which recounted the agreeable adventures of a trio who kept on encountering men and places they neither sought nor expected. Little point in underlining that every language has certain special words of its own to describe a shade of feeling or a stroke of fortune, and that other tongues don't quite manage to catch the inflection. They become Leitmotifs—to use a German word that has been taken over by the French and the English languages for lack of an exact rendering of their own. There is nothing untoward about serendipity. It was always precious, and may nowadays become increasingly rare. And surely every child knows that it is rather easier for fabled princes to find happy ends than for Western man caught between the dangers of the Gulag Archipelago and the Post-Industrial Society.
