All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way.

“Nothing happened,” he said to me. Except everything happened, I explained to him. In a singular moment, his entire life changed. So, too, did the lives of the sixty people who now worked for him, plus their families, plus the people doing business with him. A moment of frustration and inspiration in a traffic jam had come to define his life.

Jacques Derrida once observed that some of the major events in his life were meetings with books.