“In
the land where the Parthian, as he turns in flight,
shoots
his arrows into the pursuer's breast,
from
the rocks of the crag of Achmaenia,
the
Tigris and Euphrates flow from out one source,
but
quickly with divided streams are separate.
If
they should come together
and
again be joined in a single course,
all
that the two streams bear along
would
flow in one together.
Boats
would meet boats,
and
trees meet trees torn up by the currents,
and
the mingled waters
would
together entwine their streams by chance;
but
their sloping beds restrain these chances vague,
and
the downward order of the falling torrent guides their courses.
Thus
does chance,
which
seems to rush onward without rein,
bear
the bit, and take its way by rule.”
—from
Book 5, Poem 1
Mesopotamia
was one anchor of the Fertile Crescent, and like Egypt, the other anchor, people
have fought about it incessantly. As I jot down my scribblings right now,
almost two thousand years after Boethius wrote, we still find ourselves fighting
for it, and dying for it.
Those
two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, start out in the mountains to the
north, and they wind their own paths to the sea in the south. Rivers are mighty
things, yet they are bound by their banks, and the laws of Nature limit their
power.
I have
never seen either the Tigris or the Euphrates in person, but I have seen the
Danube, and the Rhine, and the Mississippi, and the Missouri, and I learned
fairly quickly that these are forces you don’t mess with. Rivers can give life,
and they can all too easily take life away.
Still, they
are made to follow a course. They can be turbulent and destructive, but they
are kept in their place. Even when they flood, they must ultimately return
right back to where they started.
Fortune,
or chance, or luck, or probability, or whatever else we might like to call it,
is much the same as one of those rivers. It is still at one moment, and it rushes
violently at the next. It comes and it goes. On this day it provides sustenance,
and on another day it brings death. You will rely upon it, and yet you can never
be quite sure about it.
Does it
seem chaotic to me, so terribly unpredictable? That is only because I do not
understand how all the pieces fit together.
I do not
know that there was more snow up in the mountains a few months ago, and so I do
not suspect that my humble home will soon be swept away.
I do not
know that there was no rain a thousand miles away, and so I do not suspect that
my meager crops will soon die.
Luck,
good or bad, is only in how I perceive it, in my own limited way.
None of
it is ever random, just like the flow of a great river is never random. I may
fish from it today, and I may drown in it tomorrow. I may bless it or curse it,
but it is not random.
The
river will run in ways I won’t immediately predict, even as I could make some
sense of it, if only I bothered to look with some care.
Written in 1/2016
No comments:
Post a Comment