In O. Henry’s short story “The Roads of Destiny”, the young shepherd-poet David decides to leave home after an argument with his girl-friend Yvonne and walks down the road out of his village in France, walking all night and getting farther away than he had ever been. He comes to a T-intersection. Does he walk left or right, or change his mind and return home?
The three parts of the story describe the alternative adventures that await him along each road. If he goes left, he rescues a beautiful young lady from her cruel uncle, marries her, but is killed in a duel with the uncle when he challenges him. He is shot through the heart by a shot from the pistol marked as belonging to the Marquis de Beaupertuys the cruel old uncle.
If David goes to the right, he comes to Paris where conspirators are planning to assassinate the king. He is asked by a beautiful young lady to deliver a message to the palace, presumably to summon a relative to the sickbed of her father, but actually a message to the plotters. He is caught, but professes his innocence and that of the lady. They put him to the test: will he dress as the king and ride in the carriage instead of the king? He does, and is shot by the plotters, who use the ornate pistol that used to belong to the Marquis de Beaupertuys and still bears his name.
If David decides to return to the village, he makes up with Yvonne, marries her, then inherits the flock of sheep from his father. He is rich and should be happy, but he continues to write his poems and neglects the sheep. The wolf attacks often and the herd decreases. Yvonne is angry.
Finally David goes to a man in town to find out about the value of his poems. He is told they are not very good, and he should go back to shepherding. He buys a gun and shoots himself to death. The gun he buys bears the name of the Marquis de Beaupertuis.
For David, the three roads diverged at the T-junction and then converged, to give him death by a bullet from the same pistol, under different circumstances and for very different reasons.
In the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) experiment, two photons fly apart from the same “annihilation” event (electron-positron collision). After they are so far apart that they cannot communicate (because of the finite velocity of light being the maximum velocity possible), an experimenter flips the spin of one of the photons. Automatically the spin of the other photon flips. It would not flip unless the other one did. The two photons act as if they are still connected by virtue of their common origin.
The common origin of the twin photons (one is tempted to say “identical twins”) is like the T-junction in the diverging roads of David’s destiny. The roads seem to diverge, but they preserve a common “spin”, in this case David’s death by a shot from the same pistol. No matter which road he takes, regardless of any free-will decision, the end result, and even the means by which it happens, is the same. It is like that other story, the man who was to meet Death in Samara.
Are events “pulled” from the future or “pushed” from the past? Do things happen because of causes or because of intentions? Could it be that causes and intentions meet at + or – infinity? That the pattern is “hyper-circular” like a hyperbola rather than a circle? Or like a series of tangent spikes rather than a sine wave? (Would this be like epilepsy spikes versus quiet brain alpha waves?)
Circle and hyperbola (along with elipse and parabola) are conic sections. The bi-cone (two cones meeting at the common vertex) can be seen as our relativistic time horizons into the future and into the past. Our “life-line” has to stay within the bi-cone; we cannot reach the time-space beyond this, again because of the finite velocity of light. But future and past are symmetrical in this scheme. In our living experience the time-symmetry is broken; the past is (theoretically) knowable, the future is not. This is because we are (anti)entropic creatures.
We can think in terms of circles (cycles), like the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle and the water cycle. Usually we do this in terms of causes pushing from behind, until “what goes around comes around” to the same starting point. But we could think about it in terms of purposes or intentions, as in Aristotle’s “final cause” – although traditional biologists would accuse us of the crime of “vitalism”. But the circle would still close.
An ellipse, being a closed curve, is little different from a circle, as far of being either a diagram of (lagged or advanced) causes or purposes. Yet there is one difference: along the ascending branch lies ordinary causation (where the cause precedes the consequence), but along the descending branch, we have a case of “downward causation”, as Sperry postulated for the operation of the human brain.
A parabola is divergent, like Chaos. The classic “chaos equation” is a parabola. The diverging branches do not even approach any line asymptotically, as the branches of a hyperbola do. It is a transitional case between an ellipse and a hyperbola, between closed conic curves and open ones.
Or is a hyperbola really not an open curve? If + or – infinity is a point (for us unimaginable) opposite to zero, a hyperbola and a tangent could be “closed” through it like a strange loop.
But back to David and his destiny. He could have escaped death each time. On the left road, he could have avoided challenging the uncle, lived happily ever after with his lady. On the right road, he could have denounced the lady and not posed as the king in the carriage. On the road back, he could have been happy with Yvonne and the sheep. But what he could not do on any of the three roads is to give up his poetry, or his addiction to poetic/romantic situations. He essentially died for his devotion to poetry and adventure.
This story (as well as “Death in Samara”) seems to indicate that Fate writes only the endings of our stories, while our freewill decisions fill in the interim details. This is intriguing, but not very believable. In situations described by chaos theory, “fate” writes only the beginnings of stories (e.g. the development of weather), while divergence (still deterministic, but not predictable) occurs later. But then, chaos does not start from a strictly identical T-junction or a common annihilation event.
The fair lady on the left road and the right road represents David’s poetry. When he contemplates her (or “it” on the road back), Yvonne (who represents real life) is forgotten. David’s poetry is his Nemesis, whether it presents itself as a victim on the left road, or a vampire on the right road, or a fatal addiction on the backward road. Poetically, he would rather die a romantic death for his fair lady than to live a prosaic life with Yvonne and the sheep.