Love Your Fate

“We live life forwards, but we can only understand it backwards.” Kierkegaard

The film version of H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine left a deep impression on me when I saw it about 40 years ago – a much deeper impression, I might add, than the book, which I have tried to read a few times but never finished. In the film, a group of time-travellers leaves the 20th century and returns to pre-history, to the very dawn of life on earth, before the emergence of humans, animals, even birds. Only insects seem to swarm across the landscape. Before they leave the capsule, the travellers are warned that they must not, under any circumstances, step from the path that has been laid out for them. However, one man does leave it momentarily, crushing a bug of some kind under his foot. A matter of no consequence, he thinks, not worth reporting to the authorities. But when they return to the 20th century, they are not helped from the time-machine by the human beings who put them in, but by gigantic, hideous insects: the destruction of one tiny, apparently insignificant creature had changed the whole course of evolution.

The film impressed me, not because it was a particularly good film, or because it was horrific, but because I saw it at a time when I was just becoming aware of the interconnectedness of events and, in odd moments, I used to play the game of tracing out the chain of apparently trivial antecedent causes which led to incidents of considerable importance. For example, the first meeting of my parents at a dance in Pontefract Town Hall. A pretty momentous encounter from my point of view, but what brought them to it? A casual suggestion by a friend? Did my father pop in out of the rain? Had he missed his last bus home to Featherstone, and, if he had, what had been the circumstances preceding that? A queue for the toilets in the pub, perhaps, a queue he wouldn’t have been in had he not had that extra pint with his friend Jimmy who had that afternoon won £5 on the horses and was feeling generous? I’d better stop there, but the game could go on (theoretically at least) back and back and back through the never-ending web of circumstances, right back to the bug scurrying through the primeval jungle. I once traced out the marriage of my friend Raymond Doughty and the subsequent birth of his daughter to a shaving cut that made me late for school, but which led to a meeting with a woman whose best friend eventually became Raymond’s wife. Play the game yourself. It’s fascinating.
It is also quite sobering because it will demonstrate to you that if you were to remove one ingredient from the past – even a tiny one, even a painful one – you would not be who you are today. Pluck one strand from the web and everything unravels irretrievably. Your disappointments and sorrows, your mistakes and your failures, your disasters and your tragedies, have played just as much a part in the development of the person who sits here today as have your triumphs and successes, and you cannot lament any of them without lamenting what you have become.

As Walt Whitman says:
These became part of that child who went forth everyday,
And who now goes forth, and will always go forth everyday.
If you can’t accept your past, you can’t accept yourself.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my own life. In the past I have regretted, to some extent, the circumstances of my early education. What would my life have been like, I used to think, if I had been born into the middle class, with university educated parents who could have fired me with enthusiasm for the academic life, and nurtured in me a desire, and an expectation, to attend one of Britain’s leading universities? Would I not have carved some little niche for myself in the academic world and become a university don, a professor, a writer of impenetrable but impressive tomes that would have assured me of some limited fame while alive and a footnote in the history books after death? But it wasn’t like that. I don’t want to romanticise my early life; I wasn’t born into crippling poverty, and my parents were always loving, generous, and concerned, but I grew up, just after the Second World War, in a working class family which always had enough, but which never had anything to spare. There were no books in the house beyond a battered dictionary, printed in the 19th century, and a copy of Picturegoer Annual, bought for my sister around 1950. When I was twelve my parents bought me a second-hand set of encyclopaedias from the proprietor of the local fish and chip shop who was clearing out his attic, but we had nowhere to display them, and they were piled in the corner of my bedroom until they were finally discarded, dusty, fusty and largely unread, after three or four years. I fared reasonably well in the grammar school, but without the kind of support that is taken for granted among the middle classes – a warm, quiet room to study in, parents who can test you on your Latin verbs and who know the difference between Chemistry and Physics – I was left to my own devices which, when adolescence struck, did not tend too strongly in the direction of the academic. I was just coming into my own when it was too late, and despite pretty good A Levels, I went into teacher training and not to Oxford.

This left me, at 21, without a degree and therefore three or four rungs down the professional ladder, with the toughest classes and the lowest pay. I came to resent this somewhat, particularly as I soon discovered that I was the intellectual equal of those who were granted superior status. I rectified the situation and, over the years, went on to gain a whole bunch of degrees and diplomas, and maybe the resentment was an inspiration, I don’t know. But I don’t feel the slightest resentment now, not about my early life, or my education. In fact, I am delighted by it. It couldn’t have been more right. I never had to compete with my parents academically, and so I never disappointed them; however meagre my achievements, my parents were always impressed and this was very gratifying to me. My success as a teacher was in no small measure because I understood the circumstances of the working class children I was teaching – I had lived in the same kind house, I had stood on the same street corners – and the independence of thought which I prize so much and which I have maintained so steadfastly, must owe something to the fact that, at an impressionable age, I did not fall under the spell of some celebrity scholar like A.J. Ayer or F.R. Leavis, who would have made of me little more than an academic clone. (Can you see me, with studied eccentricities, glass of sherry in hand, pretending to be a Logical Positivist?) And my message now, such as it is, cannot be dismissed on the grounds that it is the unrealistic product of a sheltered background (although, of course, it may be dismissed on other grounds). I was aware of the realities of life from my earliest days and I’ve never lost sight of them.

Then, take the fact that Morag and I have no children. A cause for regret, yes, particularly a couple of decades ago, but now, to tell you the truth, I can see the advantages. Not having a family to feed and to provide Nike shoes for has given me enormous freedom. I have been able to pick and choose the work that I do – or even whether I should work at all – and I have not had to make the kind of compromises that people with children have to make. I could not have raised a family on teacher’s pay, so I would have had to become a headmaster, which would ultimately have meant that I would have had to pretend to take the whole ridiculous schooling business rather seriously. One can easily convince oneself that teaching Shakespeare has value, but it is very much harder for someone like me to consider that schools have anything much to do with genuine education. And you can guarantee this: if I were paying university fees I would not be standing here before you today. I would not have been able to take time out to do ministerial training, nor would I have been able to take on the relatively low-paid job of minister. So, you would have been deprived of a minister, and I would have been deprived of five years of enormously rewarding work, with more time for thought and reflection than the average teacher or the average parent enjoys.

We all have to learn to accept the past, to accept the hand that we have been dealt, with all its weak and strong suits, and to stop looking around for things to blame for our condition. This is not easy to do in a culture of blame like our own. “Where there’s blame, there’s a claim,” says the advert for the ambulance-chasing solicitors; “Blame the capitalists,” chant the Marxists; “Blame the men,” shriek the feminists; “Blame your parents,” whisper the Freudians. My wife’s friend has just been told by her therapist that her present psychological imbalance is the result of her family moving from Scotland when she was eleven. That’s thirty-five years ago. Even if it were true, how does this help her? All it does is serve to increase the feelings of resentment she already has towards her mother, and, of course, to ensure that she continues to lament the past rather than to come to terms with the present. She is not depressed because of this or that element in her past: she is depressed because she is a sensitive, vulnerable, bewildered human being like the rest of us. Even Freud admitted that all psychoanalysis could hope to achieve was to bring us back to a state of “ordinary unhappiness”, or, as R.D. Laing puts it, “back to that dreadful state of alienation that we call normality”, where, I might add, we are destined to stay until we can get a better handle on life than that provided for us by the blame-mongers, whatever their persuasion.

“Amor fati,” says Nietzsche, “love your fate”, treat the vicissitudes of your life as if you had willed them, as if you needed them in order to develop as a person and as a soul. Joseph Campbell gives an example from his own experience:

I had an illuminating experience from a woman who had been in severe psychological pain for years, from an affliction that had stricken her in youth. She had been raised a believing Christian and so thought this had been God’s punishment of her for something she had done or not done at that time. She was in spiritual as well as physical pain. I told her that if she wanted release, she should affirm and not deny her suffering was her life, and that through it she had become the noble creature that she was now. And while I was saying all this, I was thinking, “Who am I to talk like this to a person in real pain, when I’ve never had anything more than a toothache?” But in this conversation, in affirming her suffering as the shaper and teacher of her life, she experienced a conversion – right there. I have kept in touch with her since – that was years and years ago – and she is indeed a transformed woman.

This story reminds me of something Beatrice Reid said to me a few months ago. Beatrice, who, as you know, is blind, was commenting on the psychological appropriateness of Jesus’s question to the blind man: “Do you want to be healed?” This wasn’t a foolish question, she said, because if someone were to ask her she would say “No”, because she has learned to see more clearly since what she calls “the impediment of sight” has been removed.

We are less prepared to view things in this way than were people in other times, and than people now in other cultures. We, with our “I have a right to be happy” approach to life – which leaves us with the constant feeling that somehow things are unfair – have a less realistic view of matters than the Mexicans of old who, according to Montaigne, whispered into the ear of a baby as soon as it was born: “Child, you were born to suffer; suffer, endure and shut up!” And, of course, we have no coherent metaphysical principle which will help us make sense of the chequered nature of life, the interweaving of light and shade, pain and pleasure, success and failure, which characterises every human life. We see a child as a tabula rasa, a blank sheet on which external influences make their indelible mark; control the environment, we think, and we can create happy people. On the other hand, the Eastern philosophies – Buddhism and Hinduism notably – see an individual as a magnet, attracting to herself those things that are necessary for her development; what befalls her is somehow willed by her. We see life in terms of externals, arbitrary incidents and accidents, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” which make or break us and which are largely beyond our control; they see it in terms of necessity, an unfolding of a destiny which, according to the laws of Karma, is an external expression of the Soul’s intrinsic condition.

Whether or not this is actually true is irrelevant; it is psychologically healthier for us to behave as if it were true so that we can stop whingeing about our plight and feeding our resentments and our sense of powerlessness. Your mother may or may not have been responsible for yesterday, but you can certainly be responsible for tomorrow. “Leave the dead to bury the dead,” says Jesus. Let the past, painful or pleasant, take care of itself. And it most assuredly will if you let it.

The Spanish poet Machado de Assis, expresses this beautifully:
Last night as I lay sleeping, I dreamt
O, marvellous error-
That there was a beehive here inside my heart
And all the golden bees were making white combs
And sweet honey from all my failures.

Let the bees of your Soul make the golden honey from your past; just pay attention to gathering the nectar from the present.

Bill Darlison
6th May, 2001