Such contingency is lamented by romantics who entertain fantasies of going back. The movement from “what might have been” to “what has been”11 is not a fall to be lamented but the arc of creaturehood. The conversion of possibility into actuality is not a loss but a focusing. For every path taken, of course, another was not, and our mercurial souls will sometimes wander back to the fork in the road and wonder. But only stasis could have kept the options open, and for temporal beings, stasis is death.
