Do you ever feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny? Don’t you think that the choices you make are not your choices at all, but rather decisions foisted upon you as if by fate?
It’s precisely this phenomenon that led me to launch this blog, D-INTEGRATION, after two previous attempts fizzled out. In July 2024, I purchased hosting space and a domain name and began to write. I wrote as if I needed it to survive. I wrote multiple blog posts over the course of three months, and I engaged with China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, Tunisia’s International Festival of Symphonic Music of El Jem, and the strangeness of Drift Phonk music being used in drone footage during the Ukraine War. I also shared a few very short stories (really, more like flash fiction) that I had written.
But then, the momentum vanished.
I attempted to revive it in February, and I made a post about Nick Land’s devitalizing Terminator philosophy. Once again, the blog fizzled out.
Over the course of the past few weeks, I had considered launching it once more, and I was spurred to action by a remarkable novel. Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment was the exact text that I needed to begin writing and publishing once again.1Sarah Perry, Enlightenment (New York: Mariner Books, 2024). On the surface, Enlightenment tells the story of an aging writer named Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley, a girl who he takes into his care after her mother died in childbirth. Both characters are members of a conservative Baptist church in a small town in Essex. However, Thomas–by chance–discovers some of the papers of a young woman named Maria Văduva. Văduva’s time in the town was, at first glance, unremarkable. However, Thomas’s hunt for her makes clear that she left a much larger imprint than other denizens had thought.
While I found the story told in Perry’s novel meaningful, I found that her development of the book’s themes was remarkable. In particular, I appreciated her play with the concept of “providence.”
In the 21st century, the very idea “providence” seems misguided at best, and actively damaging at worst. After all, our lives are not being guided from the outside: we, as individuals, have control over our own decisions. Our notion of ethics is heavily dependent on the idea of free will. After all, we have to hold individuals–and ourselves–responsible for every single action. If you come to my house, kill my dog, and say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t have any choice. I was karmically destined to do this,” you can expect that I would respond by smacking you across the head. That, too, was karmically destined.
On the other hand, it sometimes feels as though things seem to fall into place without any action being taken at all. We are driven forward in our lives as if we are being swept down a river. Admittedly, we can choose to swim against the stream, but we will tire ourselves out quickly and–if the water is moving at a particularly rapid pace–we may have no choice but to give up and drown. Swimming with the stream, on the other hand, allows us to experience rapid progress.
Should we swim forward in a context, we might just say, “Huh, it seemed destined to be that way all along.” This, in a nutshell, is providence.
While the term “providence” is today largely associated with Reformed Christianity, it appears to me to echo the classical Mediterranean concept of the logos. The logos, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, was the innate and deeply ordered nature of the cosmos. We mere mortals might look at the world with incredulity, but the universe itself has a deeper logic than we could ever comprehend. When we live in accordance with the logos, things seem to come naturally. When we act in ways contrary to it, we come to feel that we simply cannot stop fighting. Everything becomes a challenge and all directions forward appear foreclosed. When this occurs, it may well be that we were never meant to move in that direction at all.
While Perry’s novel is ostensibly about love, astronomy, and aging, it is remarkably difficult to avoid the sense that Thomas and Grace’s fates could not be other than they are, nor could poor Maria Văduva’s. This sense is providence, and it is the logos.
I experienced something strange while reading the book, too. Thomas Hart’s columns resonated with me on a visceral level: he represented the sort of man I want to be. He is a symbol of healthy, reflective, and affectionate masculinity. He cares for others, and his own mistakes pain him. He balances his inner world with reflections on astronomy, historical research, and his local community. “What a powerful character,” I thought. Seeing his character in action, I decided that I must do the same. It felt that providence was what guided me to relaunch my blog.
It is thanks to Thomas Hart, or perhaps Sarah Perry, that I recovered the inspiration to write again. I hope that future posts will resonate with you as Enlightenment resonated with me.
Endnotes
- 1Sarah Perry, Enlightenment (New York: Mariner Books, 2024).
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