… have the sort of fog that lends
everyone a French Lieutenant’s
Woman nimbus.
Everyone is suddenly a melancholy enigmatic apparition. Stepping out of the mist – – but then beaches and oceans have always been ghostly settings for UD, where her dead step out for a boardwalk up-and-back with her, and where she’s perfectly willing to engage them in the old themes, the old questions. People’s lives end and in so doing become closed narratives; and UD tells and retells the tales she makes of these rounded lives, because she wants to understand. “Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind,” says a character in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. And okay, c’est entendu, but it doesn’t discourage the search for meaning.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose…
The dead on the boardwalk with me listen as I try to finger just what that something was for this one and for that one; it’s like Ravelstein telling Chick that he has a fatum:
It’s hard, all in all, to find a less prudent person than you, Chick. When I consider your life, I begin to be tempted to believe in a fatum. You have a fatum. You really are one for sticking your neck out.
For everyone maybe, then, some heavy through-line over which they have no control. They can only play it out. It’s harder to credit fate in the modern affluent settings in which UD grew up — choice and privilege and freedom seem to abound — but this seeming good fortune probably just hides the hidden thing that much more deeply.
March 19th, 2021 at 9:16AM
From a physicist whom I admire greatly:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/07/13/free-will-is-as-real-as-baseball/
From the “The Gay Divorcee:”
“Chance is a fool’s name for fate.”
It’s nice to think about these things from time to time and then thoroughly forget them for long stretches, while choosing spouses, perennials, for the garden, and drinks.
March 19th, 2021 at 10:08AM
Greg: The Sean Carroll post is wonderful – many thanks for sending. For me, thinking about the degree/type of real agency we have in the world is important — even more important (as Carroll stresses) is disentangling this complex question from basic moral/social truths about choice, bad acts, and consequences.
I love the quotation from Gay Divorcee.
Couldn’t agree more on your last point. Quiet off-season stretches at the cold thundering ocean constitute (for me) the special occasions where you pace and ponder, like Kant on his daily walks. Ordinarily, I’m all about choosing perennials.
March 19th, 2021 at 11:53AM
Then let me recommend this, good for a change of pace in the Covid miasma:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBpR0LBsUfM
Apologies if you’ve seen it or enough other similar stuff. He does a great job of summarizing a lot of basic things in a bouncy, entertaining, clear and compact way.