On Fate and Time Traveling

I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. It was hard to read but harder to put down; it is so beautiful and so sad. Perhaps to one but recently married this story of endlessly (no, not endlessly) losing and finding and losing love hits too close to home.

This passage especially caught my attention  (pages 76-77 in my edition):

"The choices we're working with here are a block universe, where past, present, and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted...; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it's all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway. ... And what do you vote for?"

Clare is silent. Her pragmatism and her romantic feelings about Jesus and Mary are, at thirteen, almost equally balanced. A year ago she would have said God without hesitation. In ten years she will vote for determinism, and ten years after that Clare will believe that the universe is arbitrary, that if God exists he does not hear our prayers, that cause and effect are inescapable and brutal, but meaningless. ... She shakes her head. "I don't know. I want God. Is that okay?"

I feel like an asshole. "Of course it's okay. That's what you believe."

"But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true."

Our world is very like Henry's and Clare's, and I have often had these same thoughts. When I was a teenager, I voted for determinism myself. And one day when I was 20, I enjoyed a beautiful morning full of sunshine and an afternoon of good conversation with my friends before learning that hours before, before I had even awoken that morning, someone close to me had been killed in an accident, and I knew indeed that cause and effect are brutal and are meaningless.

Yes, our worlds are very alike, but by grace we do not know it, because unlike poor Henry, we live our lives in one direction only, one moment following the next like pearls on a string, each one fresh and new and bright. Our wills to us seem free, for not knowing what the next moment will bring, we cannot tell the difference.

So rejoice in every borrowed choice; it is a gift. Take it gladly and with reverence as if the future really were yours to make how you would. For a story is not less true for being fictional nor less real when it is finished.