You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings... serendipitously.
Interpretation
True discoveries happen when one is open to unforeseen opportunities rather than strictly following a predetermined plan.
This quote by John Barth highlights the idea that significant achievements and delightful surprises often arise from exploration and openness rather than rigidly adhering to a predetermined path. When one sets out on a journey with good intentions but without strict expectations, they are more likely to encounter unexpected and fortuitous experiences, akin to the concept of serendipity.
In practice
When discussing the benefits of improvisation in creative projects.
He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.
I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being meβs no joke.
I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.
As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.
To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.
If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
If you really want to know what's happening here and now, you've got to use your own eyes and your own judgment.
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