Such Is Life - Joseph Furphy (philippa perry book txt) 📗

above the horizon; and the repose of the wilga shade was more to be desired than the activity of the wood-heap. To everything there is a time and a season; and the tactical moment for weary approach to a dwelling is just when fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, and all the air a solemn stillness holds. So, after a moment’s hesitation, my instinctive sense of bush etiquette caused me to turn stealthily away, and seek the wicket gate which afforded ingress to Rory’s horse-paddock. But I want you to notice that this decision was preceded by a poise of option between two alternatives. Now mark what followed, for, like Falstaff’s story, it is worth the marking.

[Each undertaking, great or small, of our lives has one controlling alternative, and no more. To illustrate this from the play of Hamlet: You will notice that, up to a certain point of time, the Prince governs his own destiny⁠—at least, as far as the Ghost’s commission is concerned, and this covers the whole drama. He is master and umpire of his circumstances, so that when two or more lines of action, or a line of action and a line of inaction, appear equally efficacious, he can select the one which appears to be of least resistance. But subsequent to that point of time, he is no longer the arbiter of his own situation, but rather the puppet of circumstances. There are no more divergent roads; if he desires to leave the one he has chosen, he must break blindly through a hedge of moral antagonisms. His alternatives have become so lopsided that practically there is only one course open. The initial exercise of judgment was not merely an antecedent to later developments of the plot; it was a Rubicon-crossing, which has committed the hero to a system of interlaced contingencies; and the tendency of this system bears him away, half-conscious of his own impotence, to where the rest is silence. The turning-point is where Hamlet engages the Players to enact the Murder of Gonzago.

A major-alternative may create and enclose all the secondary alternatives of after life. A minor-alternative may exhaust itself in one minute, or less, leaving its indelible, though imperceptible, scar on the experimenter, and, through him, on the world in which he lives. The major-alternative is the Shakespearian “tide in the affairs of men,” often recognised, though not formulated. In any case, each alternative brings into immediate play a flash of free-will, pure and simple, which instantly gives place⁠—as far as that particular section of life is concerned⁠—to the dominion of what we call Destiny. The two should never be confounded. “Who can control his fate?” asks the ruined Othello. No one, indeed. But everyone controls his option, chooses his alternative. Othello himself had independently evolved the decision which fixed his fate, recognising it as such an alternative. Thus:⁠—

Put out the light, and then⁠—Put out the light?
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me;⁠—but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is the Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have plucked thy rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again;
It needs must wither.

Also he perceives that it is a major-alternative which confronts him; and he contrasts this with the supposititious minor-alternative of extinguishing the lamp. But how often do we accept a major-alternative, whilst innocently oblivious to its gravity!

In Macbeth, the alternatives are very obvious. The interest of the play centres on the poise of incentive between action and non-action, and the absolute free-will of election. But that election once made, we see⁠—and the hero himself acknowledges⁠—a practical inevitableness in all succeeding atrocities which mark his career as king.

Such momentous alternatives are simply the voluntary rough-hewing of our own ends. Whether there’s a Divinity that afterwards shapes them, is a question which each inquirer may decide for himself. Say, however, that this postulated Divinity consists of the Universal Mind, and that the Universal Mind comprises the aggregate Human Intelligence, cooperating with some moral centre beyond. And that the spontaneous sway of this influence is toward harmony⁠—toward the smoothing of obstacles, the healing of wounds. In the axiom that “Nature reverts to the norm,” there is a recognition of this restorative tendency; and the religious aspect of the same truth is expressed in the proverb that “God is Love.” For the grass will grow where Attila’s horse has trod, while that objectionable Hun himself is represented by a barrow-load of useful fertiliser. But say that this always comes about by law of Cause (which is Human Freewill) and Effect (which is Destiny)⁠—never by sporadic intervention. Yet a certain scar, tracing its origin to an antecedent alternative, will remain as the signet of that limitation under which the Divinity works⁠—the limitation, namely, of Destiny, or the fixed issue of present effect from foregone cause; such cause having been perpetually directed and redirected by recurring operation of individual free-will, exercised, independently, by those emanations from the moral centre which, by courtesy, we call reasonable beings.

Vague? Yes. Well, put it in parable form. A young man has reached an absolute poise of incentive. He tosses a shekel. “Head⁠—I go and see life; tail⁠—I stay at home. Head it is.” The alternative is accepted; whereupon Destiny puts in her spoke, bringing such vicissitudes as are inevitable on the initial option. In due time, another alternative presents itself, and the poise of incentive recurs. The Prodigal spits on a chip, and tosses it. “Wet⁠—I crawl back home; dry⁠—I see it out. Wet it is.” So he goes, to meet the ring, and the robe, and the fatted calf. His latter alternative has taken him home; and a felicitous option on the old man’s part has given him a welcome. But the earlier alternative is following him up, for the farm is gone! The old man himself cannot undo the effect of the foregone choice.

Or put it