That old "Fire and Ice" sync

My 2019 post "Fire and ice" tells the story, insofar as I could remember it, of the first synchronicity ever to get my attention. It involved coming across the same four lines from Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" twice within the space of an hour -- once in a sermon on chastity and once in a popular science book. At the time of that post, I thought that I might have been around 12 years old and that the book might have been one of Carl Sagan's, but I couldn't remember very clearly. However, I'm now confident that I've found the two documents that figured in the sync. It wasn't Sagan, and I wasn't 12.

The sermon was "Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments," a speech delivered by Jeffrey R. Holland on January 12, 1988, at Brigham Young University, of which institution he was at that time the president. Here is where he first quotes Frost:

May I begin with half of a nine-line poem by Robert Frost. (The other half is worth a sermon also, but it will have to wait for another day.) Here are the first four lines of Frost’s “Fire and Ice.”

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

A second, less poetic but more specific opinion is offered by the writer of Proverbs:

Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?

Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned? . . .

But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.

A wound and dishonour shall he get; and his reproach shall not be wiped away. [Proverbs 6:27–33]

In getting at the doctrinal seriousness, why is this matter of sexual relationships so severe that fire is almost always the metaphor, with passion pictured vividly in flames? What is there in the potentially hurtful heat of this that leaves one’s soul—or perhaps the whole world, according to Frost—destroyed, if that flame is left unchecked and those passions unrestrained? . . .

Notice that the Frost quote is immediately followed by a second quote, described as "less poetic" and "by the writer of Proverbs." This will be relevant later.

Later in the speech, Holland quotes the same four lines of Frost once more:

Someday, somewhere, ­sometime the morally unclean will, until they repent, pray like the rich man, wishing Lazarus to “dip . . . his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:24).

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

The popular science book was, it turns out, Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, published on March 24, 1994, just nine days after my 15th birthday. The four lines from Frost serve as an epigraph to the 14th chapter:

As in the Holland speech, Frost is immediately followed by a second quote, in prose, in this case Yogi Berra's "It ain't over 'til it's over." The legacy of Yogi Berra is quite similar to that of the authors of Proverbs: a collection of short, memorable sayings.

I clearly wasn't 12 when this sync occurred. Given my reading habits at the time, I almost certainly would have read Hyperspace as soon as it was available at the local public library, so probably in 1994, when I was 15 years old. That's a reasonable time for me to have read Holland's speech, too. Jeffrey R. Holland became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles -- one of the CJCLDS's top 15 leaders worldwide -- on June 23, 1994, just two months after Hyperspace was published. That would be a natural time for people to be reading and recommending old speeches by Jeffrey R. Holland, such as "Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments."

The only remaining question mark is how I came to read Holland and Kaku within an hour of each other. My family was quite strict about Sabbath observance, and I wouldn't have been reading a secular book like Hyperspace on a Sunday -- but I find it hard to imagine myself reading a sermon on chastity on any other day of the week! My best guess is that we read Holland's speech, or part of it, in early-morning seminary on a weekday. Since I was at that time following a rather loose "homeschooling" program that mostly consisted of just reading whatever I wanted, I might easily have come home from a Very Special Lesson on chastity in early-morning seminary and turned immediately to a pop-sci book for "school." (Actually, everybody else should be putting that word in scare-quotes. School as "leisure" is etymologically correct.) That's my best guess as to what happened.

Or perhaps the "within an hour" bit was misremembered, just as I'd misremembered by age at the time. Certainly it was a very short interval that made the coincidence seem impossible.

What prompted my revisiting of this old Frost sync was the more recent Frost sync documented in "The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Interestingly, this more recent sync also involves someone quoting only four lines of a longer poem by Frost. This quotation was in a movie whose Chinese name translates to Nine Shots. Holland makes a point of saying that the Frost poem he is quoting is nine lines in length, and Hyperspace was published nine days after my birthday.