The insignificant cosmic overlap

I don't know if you read that long post below (about literature), but I checked to see which book Yann Martel sent Harper this week and here's what he had posted:

It turns out Barack Obama is a reader, a big reader. And the books he has read and cherished have not only been practical texts that someone interested in governance would likely favour. No, he also likes poetry, fiction, philosophy: the Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Melville, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Derek Walcott, the philosophers Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Augustine, and many more. They’ve formed his oratory, his thinking, his very being. He’s a man-built-by-words and he has impressed the whole world.

I would sincerely recommend that you read Gilead before you meet President Obama on February 19th. For two people who are meeting for the first time, there’s nothing like talking about a book that both have read to create a common ground and a sense of intimacy, of knowing the other in a small but important way. After all, to like the same book implies a similar emotional response to it, a shared recognition of the world reflected in it. This is assuming, of course, that you like the book.

Apparently Martel and I read that same article in the New York Times and reached similar conclusions - that Obama's worldview and eloquence owe a lot to his literary heritage. Of course, this coincidence has me creeped out and thrilleded all at the same time.

Have you seen the movie "Waking Life?" There's this one scene where two characters are talking about how similar intellectual events in history seemed to happen simultaneously on opposite sides of the world. In a time before airplanes and email. This makes me wonder if that could still be possible, and I hope that it is. I don't know if that's where the 'collective unconscious' might come from, but if sure is interesting to think about!