In an essay on gardening for The New Yorker magazine, Yiyun Li writes: “A rose is never an argument. There is no such thing as an angry rose or a moping rose or an empowered rose; only a realistic rose, a matter-of-fact rose, a transient rose. Each flower in my garden holds some concrete space, a physical one as well as a temporal one. A flower, like a thought, a sentence, a book, is but a placeholder.”

Serendipity was a word created by Horace Walpole. He took the Persian word for Sri Lanka—Serendip, and formed the word serendipity upon the fairytale The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

The three lectures in this year’s Berlin Family Lectures will investigate two less-discussed roles of literature: as a placeholder and as a place where discoveries happen by serendipity. During a contentious time when humanistic values often feel as though besieged, and life is increasingly driven by quests and outcomes, Li hopes to bring her eclectic reading practice and her life experience into an exploration of how to stay enchanted with a muddled and disenchanting world.