Fateful
Tossing out the word fate might be sufficient to hush most dinner parties.
Italy 2016
Tossing out the word fate might be sufficient to hush most dinner parties. There’s too much weight. Too much earnestness. A speech about fate is sure to jar the guests—now the wine tastes sour, now there’s a low murmur, now there’s an awkwardness to the night. And the word isn’t even easily grasped, even though its meaning was once a commonplace part of belief. To my ears it comes with distant, rather vague undertones, there’s a strangeness to the syllables, as it doesn’t quite conform to any of the concepts that I do understand, almost like it is a foreign word that doesn’t translate to contemporary English.
Of course I do have a sense of its meaning, but this is a loose, formless sense, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised by the raised eyebrows and deceitful smiles and changed subjects that are certain to follow its use today. Because in many ways at the root of this word is a belief that contradicts what’s most fundamental about the modern world. To my mind fate conjures a more mythical past, I imagine fairy tales and religious parables and archetypical traits, all the stories where notions of destiny are almost humdrum, where characters travel along a fixed, unalterable tree-lined path, where characters adhere to an essence—yet this belief only works if you believe that transformation is impossible. And that’s a belief, it seems to me, that’s utterly hostile to the modern world. It negates any potential for choice; there’s no liberation from the chains of your nature.
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You might even reduce our ancient stories to this concept of fate, to the notion of a destination that’s foretold, to the notion of character as the determiner of destiny; and you might even reduce our contemporary stories to the concept of transformation, where a character grows or adapts or emerges, where the likely destination at birth proves escapable. Somewhere along the way, it seems, those earlier stories lost some power, they began to feel groundless, and so we ended up with this little rupture—because you can’t simultaneously believe in fate and transformation.
In those ancient stories, even when there’s a tug toward evil or hints of goodness, we notice that the arrangements have already been made, that there’s a puppetmaster and a marionette, that there’s little room for individual choice. We discover that character, instead, is what’s fundamental: it is the essential nature of character that matters most in Homer and Dante and even Shakespeare. Yes—there’s passion and desire and rage in these ancient stories, but we must notice how every character, alas, descends to what’s most predictable about their nature.
And to believe in fate today is to believe that this mad world is not only solidified but also eternal—there’s no potential for improvement, there’s no agency, what’s inherent about the present is what foretells the future. You won’t find any room for causality or change. Obviously this is a bit contrived for a modern sensibility. If you take a long walk through a grassy field and then turn around, you don’t typically describe the clear and straight path of your footsteps as the result of design. Yet fate assumes that your character is immutable, that your nature pretty much guarantees your destiny, which feels more than just pernicious in a world where change and growth isn’t just considered possible, but is a necessary component for sanity.
All the ancient notions of fate haven’t, however, quite departed from our minds. The sensibility that wants order and purpose and causality is still present in our supposedly modern world. Whenever you hear the incantation it was bound to happen, you hear remnants of our ancient stories; whenever someone whispers it had to happen that way, you hear a reflex from a distant campfire; whenever someone declares not a coincidence to events that are, in fact, nothing but coincidences, you hear our most atavistic conclusions. A deep mysticism still lurks in our minds and is primed to define the strange or accidental or serendipitous as the planned. Of course we shouldn’t expect otherwise. If our most ancient stories fanned the campfire for our ancestors, why would we simply shake off that instinct? So there’s still a little bit of fate left, a little bit of inevitability, all of it perfectly situated to explain the unexplainable. There’s no surprise at hearing these incantations, too, in our political categories, in how we classify groups, in how we divide those good people and those bad people, in how we describe with fateful certainty the attributes of the individual onto the collective. In not jettisoning the reflex, it makes me wonder, once again, about Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, about whether there’s less of a rupture than we might believe.
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