watching that Doctor Who episode "Turn Left" today, i contemplated destiny.
in the episode, a character's life is altered by one choice, by the simple decision to turn right instead of left, to be goaded into a safe lifestyle by her mother instead of believing in her luck and forcefulness to get her from uncertainty to where she wanted to be. because the show in question is of the science fiction genre, this It's A Wonderful Life plotline showed a dystopic diversion from what we the viewers know of the show, and in that one instant everything shifted. she stepped sideways; another realm took place of the one destined for her, and everything went to hell because of it. she never reached the stars, and so they plummeted without her to help hold them aloft.
“But all around the downpour of stars went on. And then the starless patch began to grow, spreading further and further out from the center of the sky…With a thrill of wonder (and there was some terror in it too) they all suddenly realized what was happening. The spreading blackness was not a cloud at all; it was simply emptiness. The black part of the sky was the part where there were no stars left. All the stars were falling."
- C.S. Lewis
someone once said that the idea of falling stars was a chilling one. "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." - Anthony C. Clark writers terrify with that thought, with the presentation of a celestial orb snuffed out. we fear this presumably because we always imagine them as beacons, cheering us up and guiding us home. guiding us to destiny.
but what happens when they fade out? we're not always watching for them; we spend our lives looking at our feet, carefully placing one in front of the other. so there is plenty of time for the stars to sneak away with our dreams when no one is paying attention. what destiny can manifest without the lamps to guide our feet toward the paths we must take?
worse still is the sinking of reality when one remembers that light takes oh so very long to travel, in a vacuum; by the time we're made aware of them, all our stars are long gone. all our dreams are dead. those guides are nothing but remnants of old ghosts.
so what of Destiny? as far as i know, i am certainly no fictional heroine. there is more chance that we on Earth will find a way to reverse global warming and the damages of pollution than that i shall voyage among the stars in a magnificent timeship piloted by a wonderful - yet terrible - and delightful man. i have little chance for anything fantastical in my life at all, let alone so much otherworldly adventure. what destiny is there, in this existence we know as reality? here, the celestial bodies are but residual glow from simple space gas, which itself has already burnt into Nothingness. so what of our hopeful guides can be found, when they have long since been absorbed into The Dark?
step sideways.
