“There’s a kind of pointlessness about sudden and premature death,” said Jeremy at last. “A kind of sudden acute irrelevance…”
“Specially acute?” Mr. Propter questioned. “No, I shouldn’t say so. It’s no more irrelevant than any other human event. If it seems irrelevant, that’s only because, of all possible events, premature death is the most glaringly out of harmony with what we imagine ourselves to be.”
“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.
Mr. Propter smiled. “I mean what I presume you to mean,” he answered. “If a thing seems irrelevant, there must be something it’s irrelevant to. In this case, that something is our conception of what we are. We think of ourselves as free, purposive beings. But every now and then things happen to us that are incompatible with this conception. We speak of them as accidents; we call them pointless and irrelevant. But what’s the criterion by which we judge? The criterion is the picture we paint of ourselves in our own fancy; the highly flattering portrait of the free soul making creative choices and being the master of its fate. Unfortunately, the picture bears no resemblance to ordinary human reality. It’s the picture of what we’d like to be, of what, indeed, we might become if we took the trouble. To a being who is in fact the slave of circumstance there’s nothing specially irrelevant about premature death. It’s the sort of event that’s characteristic of the universe in which he actually lives; though not, of course, of the universe he foolishly imagines he lives in. An accident is the collision of a train of events on the level of determinism with another train of events on the level of freedom. We imagine that our life is full of accidents, because we imagine that our human existence is passed on the level of freedom. In fact, it isn’t. Most of us live on the mechanical level, where events happen in accordance with the laws of large numbers. The things we call accidental and irrelevant belong to the very essence of the world in which we elect to live.”
Annoyed at having, by an inconsidered word, landed himself in a position which Mr. Propter could show to be unwarrantably “idealistic,” Jeremy was silent.
Aldous Huxley
