Ah, the contingencies. I add my voice to the others congratulating you on your escape from the anonymous old guy, and from Barb. Had you got on the freeway a minute earlier or later, you wouldn't have been a component in the near-catastrophe—someone else might have occupied the perilous spacetime slot on the roadway just then in your stead, and might not have driven out of harm's way as deftly. All this returns me to thoughts of contingency that have occupied me now and again since an acquaintance (more than nodding, but not an intimate) was killed in a traffic accident early in 1968. Half a minute fore or aft would likely have put her out of harm's way, and that alternative future, with her 53 today and likely a dull suburban matron, remains oddly compelling when I think back to her death. Thirty seconds! Maybe fifteen seconds!—and, whatever else might have befallen her subsequently, she'd likely have lived to see 2001 (the movie, I mean, released just a couple of months after her death), the King and RFK assassinations, Nixon's election, Kent State...[insert cheap crack here about the Almighty's mercy in sparing her the latter sights]. This bifurcation of destinies is thrown into stark relief on the occasion of such a death; perhaps only slightly less so when, as here, the Angel of Blunt Trauma passes close overhead, and one feels the hot, heavy beat of its leathery wings.

But on how many occasions times past have we run our errands perfectly unaware that for a second we occupied a lane that a few moments earlier or later an eighteen-wheeler was going to inhabit without a thought on the operator's part? We might have been squashed like a bug on each of these hypothetical occasions, but somehow none of them possess the resonance of the catastrophes experienced or observed narrowly averted. The happy timeline foreclosed by tragedy is vivid to us, and the dire near-extinction of all we held dear seems almost real as we regard what might-have-been with an extra liter of adrenaline coursing through our systems. When we consider that we might have been on the roadway the other day when a drunk changed lanes without looking, this abstract consciousness somehow lacks the piquancy that attends those other contemplations. Why is this, do you suppose?

The best discussion I've seen of this to date has been in the essay "It Was To Be" by Gilbert Ryle, included in his book [link|http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521091152/qid=1126921424/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/102-8492969-3465732?v=glance&s=books|Dilemmas]. I must acknowledge, however, that I can only grasp the sense of the argument intermittently, and only after close reading—else its meaning reliably eludes me.

cordially,