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As Soon as It Happened, It Became Fixed
The immutability of the past endues life with a fatalistic quality.
Many have preoccupied themselves with weighing whether or not the happenings about us are predestined. I’ll leave such abstract subjects to smarter people. One thing that is certainly true — if not in another time and place, then at least in this time and place — is that history is immutable. If it wasn’t fate yesterday, it’s fate today. What of fate as an aftereffect?
I can’t say that it was predetermined that your eyes would one day rest on this sentence, but for all of eternity it will have happened, as it’s now happening. The moment it happened it became fixed — it is now just as immutable, inescapable, and insuperable as if it had been fated.
When I was a child, playing football and basketball with one of my friends, and we made fun of each other for this or that and laughed carelessly, was each passing day a counting down to the moment he would inevitably throw a single punch in a bar and cause another young man’s death? When we laughed at Chris for cleaning his fingerprints of off one side of a pellet gun, and then grabbing that same side with his bare hand so he could wipe off the other side, was it written in stone at that time that a few years later he would be murdered in front of his mother and brother? I can’t say. All I can say is that for…
