Days 15 & 16

Day 15

I’ve been thinking about the little inevitabilities of life. Not of life itself, because I’m not sure that humanity was inevitable, but about the inevitable moments within it.* When do things—beginnings, endings—cross over from possible to probable to inevitable? How do we chart that progression? Is it predictable?

The word itself is so interesting because we basically use it as a synonym for unavoidable, but it doesn’t mean quite the same thing, does it? Inevitable seems much more dire, has more weight. Which sentence scares you more: ‘War is inevitable’ or ‘war is unavoidable’?

Both words—unavoidable and inevitable—have the same Latin root: evitare. That word has been translated and interpreted a dozen ways but one of the main translations of evitare is to shun. To shun—a fascinating distinction, I think. It’s so much more active than to avoid. To avoid means to go around something, to ignore it, to pretend it’s not happening—but to shun is to push something away, to refuse it, to deny it a place in your home and your life. We shun what we hate. We avoid what’s inconvenient.

Maybe that’s what ‘inevitable’ is trying to capture. Its rare antonym—evitable—alludes to prevention, another more active verb. Inevitable then are the things we can’t prevent, the moments that are coming for us because they must, because we are helpless against them.

In Knives Out, Daniel Craig’s character Benoit Blanc talks about the inevitability of truth. Once toward the beginning with Marta, when he is beginning his investigation:

Benoit Blanc : Harlan's detectives, they dig, they rifle and root. Truffle pigs. I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow.
Marta Cabrera : Gravity's Rainbow.
Benoit Blanc : It's a novel.
Marta Cabrera : Yeah, I know. I haven't read it though.
Benoit Blanc : Neither have I. Nobody has. But I like the title. It describes the path of a projectile determined by natural law. Et voila, my method. I observe the facts without biases of the head or heart. I determine the arc's path, stroll leisurely to its terminus and the truth falls at my feet.

Then again much later, when he is speaking to Harlan’s mother:

Benoit Blanc: One thing I assume of age is weariness. Damned if I don’t get more tired every day. Tired of what I do. Following arcs like lobbed rocks, the inevitability of truth. But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth but what you do with the truth once you have it.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel is anything but a clear path though, and it’s hardly a simple arc. It’s 760 pages of reveries, diatribes, and musings on sex, nuclear holocaust, and megalomaniacal paranoia—among other things. I haven’t read it (nobody has) but the title does refer to a missile’s path, to the inevitable fact that once launched it must land, and will do so with destructive force.

As a historian, I’m not sure I agree with Blanc/Rian Johnson that truth will out—there are so many moments in history where we just don’t know what happened or why or how. The truth was erased and hidden, buried with the people who knew it. But as a person alive on planet Earth today, I can see his inevitability—gravity’s rainbow—in moments of my life. Things that once launched could only end one way, no matter how I tried to dodge or weave or avoid.

I’m on one of those paths now. The inevitable terminus has begun to take shape, and I’ve given up on avoiding it or preventing it or shunning it. The only thing left is to walk forward—stroll leisurely?—and see what my options are once the truth falls.

*I get melancholic and philosophical like this on overcast mornings; this is why I have to live in Southern California, to avoid being in this state all winter.

Day 16

I remember the first time I read Invisible Monsters. I was sixteen, and going through hell. I remember getting close to the end and reading a passage that threw me so much, I lay on my childhood bedroom floor for hours after and wondered if I’d ever recover. I thought I should never write again, that Palahniuk had done it all; I thought I would spend every day trying to write if it got me close to writing this well.

I think I reread Invisible Monsters three more times that year. It became the closest thing I had to a bible, and it remains one of the darkest and most inspiring pieces of literature I’ve ever read. Now, at 32, I’ve been wanting to reread it, but I’ve held back—I’m terrified it won’t hold up. But today I went back to find the passage that bowled me over back then.

Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don’t want. Find value in what we’ve been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I’m giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates.

Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there.

[…]

I’m giving you my life to prove to myself that I can, I really can love somebody. Even when I’m not getting paid, I can give love and happiness and charm. You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanent and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody.

I started the Writer’s Notebook as a 28-day challenge to find joy in writing again. Traditionally, a writer’s notebook is a collection of observations, reactions, ideas, questions, memories, quotes, sketches, lists, snippets of moving language, or some combination of the above. (Sometimes they’re also called Commonplace Books!) Want to join in? Leave a comment below and I’ll check out your work!

I started the Writer’s Notebook as a 28-day challenge to find joy in writing again. Traditionally, a writer’s notebook is a collection of observations, reactions, ideas, questions, memories, quotes, sketches, lists, snippets of moving language, or some combination of the above. (Sometimes they’re also called Commonplace Books!) Want to join in? Leave a comment below and I’ll check out your work!