The King at the Edge of the World

by Arthur Phillips

Ezzedine was pleased to have inspired some envy for Ottoman knowledge in the Englishman. Dee even confessed ruefully that what the sultan had subsidized would likely dwarf what could be built here in England, where “men were too often nervous to learn of things that contradicted their dearest falsehoods.”

I believe she sees this. Let us all act the same on Sunday, as good English, and then discuss it no further. Perhaps men could accustom themselves to living with a small amount of doubt. I think doubt a necessary ingredient to live.”

But the reality of power—a field of study Ezzedine had ignored, even as he benefited from it—could not be denied infinitely. He would be subject to its immutable laws whether he studied them or pretended they didn’t exist.

He felt a strange satisfaction at every play’s ending, when, with the epilogue, all questions were answered. The fate of every character was revealed. There was a deep pleasure in simply knowing what happened to everyone at the end.

Thatcher felt again a sort of father’s affection for him. Or it was no more than an older man’s pity at a young man not yet aware of how irrelevant so many things are.

History is written by the future, and therefore distorted at its start. There’s no other way to write it, of course, but it always glows with the unnatural clarity of having eliminated all the possibilities that didn’t happen. The present doesn’t feel like a link in a chain leading to the eventual coherent historical event, and unlived futures infinitely outnumber the one statistically improbable reality that occurred.