Mere coincidences. What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?
This echoes something I said in the introduction to my collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories: “For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors—which is the logic of narratives in general—over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.”
I don’t believe in fate, but I also don’t think the best way to understand life is as a sequence of random events, one after another. To make sense of lived experience, to give shape to our own character arc, we construct a self-narrative that, in the end, is the only measure of our soul, the only authoritative account of our journey through Dante’s dark wood, complete with wanderings off the straight path, replete with digressions that ultimately redeem our fortunate errors and lucky falls.
The gods of Dara know more than they let on.
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