Serendipity as a procurer

From The Sense of an Ending by Christopher Hawtree.

To call this a magpie approach would be wrong, for he neatly quotes Thomas Mann on the serendipity that is scholarship:

there is something almost comical about the ability and willingness to find references to one's own passionate preoccupation in whatever one reads, and the truth is that pertinent things run into one from all directions, they are played into one's hands virtually in the manner of a procurer.