(urth) Why so much synchronicity?

[Jeff Wilson]

junk06 at amalar.com wrote:

> It's not just relatives. Even as the narrator keeps mentioning how 
> incomprehensibly populated Nessus is, he keeps running into people he 
> knows. He even runs into people he knows out in the wilderness sometimes. 
> Synchronicity abounds.

My impression is that Nessus is underpopulated, with five standing 
buildings per inhabitant.

> Meets man in library, meets same man years later racing down a street.
> Meets man digging a grave, meets same man years later in a boat.
> Has childhood friend, meets him again years later in the middle of a vast 
> ocean.
> Meets man in library, meets him years later in another library across the 
> country.
> etc etc etc for probably a dozen more examples

The Eata conincidence I'll give you, but the others you likst are hardly 
that. My impression of the time passing is also much shorter for the 
rest; Thecla's imprisonment might be a year long, and Severian's exile 
seems barely to last the summer. It makes sense to me for Racho to be 
stationed near the citadel, for Hildegrin to continue his resurrection 
business in the corpse-rich area of Nessus, and to meet a library 
janitor elsewhere in the same library.