"It's nothing supernatural. Most people have a wheel riding up on a wire, or some rails in the street, some kind of guide or groove, to keep them moving in the direction of their destiny. But you keep bouncing free. Avoiding penance and thereby definition."
* * * * * * * * * *
"It's nothing supernatural"
This is a weird statement in the middle of what is a pretty supernatural discussion, being about sin and repentance. I suppose we could consider it metaphysical, or philosophical, perhaps scientifically metaphorical. But Drave is ultimately trying to point out what he's describing must be part of the natural order of the world. Destiny as a scientific principle encoded in the fabric of reality, probably, according to all the new age people who don't understand it, based on quantum physics.
"Most people have a wheel riding up on a wire, or some rails in the street, some kind of guide or groove, to keep them moving in the direction of their destiny"
Drave is suggesting free will does not exist. But on a scientific level, remember! Nothing paranormal about having no free will. But I totally get that. If you view a life from the end of the life back towards the beginning, you see a full picture of that life. At that point, the life is unchangeable. It is set in stone. You can say whatever the elderly person did or who they became was destiny. Because that's what happened to them. Nothing different could have happened to them because of the way time works. That's it. Their one life.
So if we can see how life is unchangeable after having lived it, can we not expect it to work the other way around? Can we not look at a baby and realize their life is already plotted and complete? They have the illusion of choice as they age but can ultimately only choose a single path. They are headed toward their destiny because your destiny cannot be something that never happens to you, by definition.
Scientifically, this doesn't rule out free will. We can perceive that a person is free to make their choices as they move through time. But we know each choice they make cannot be undone. So from an early perspective, it looks like free will. From a later perspective, it looks like destiny. Drave is pointing out that most people are on rails. For whatever reason, most of their choices are obvious or, in some way (chemical, environmental, genetic), pre-planned. But it does not mean you cannot go off the rails of the destiny expected of you. Philosophically, this can be looked on as somebody "bouncing free" of their destined path. And scientifically? Well, that gets into some philosophy of science stuff that probably verges on the paranormal whether Drave wants it to or not.
"But you keep bouncing free"
This can be read as Lew keeps moving away from his destiny simply in the standard "making the wrong choices" kind of way. But we know, scientifically, time doesn't work in a way which causes a person's life, at the end, to be different than what it was supposed to be. What a life becomes is what that life was always meant to become. So how, then, if this is not a paranormal concept, does Lew keep bouncing free of his destiny?
My scientific theory is that he's dimension hopping. The only way to avoid your destiny is to hop timelines. Looking back at the timeline a person dies within gives one the full scope of "their" timeline. But we understand the idea of multiple timelines which branch out from one timeline, creating an infinite amount. If Lew jumped timelines, bounced free of his rails, he would be avoiding his destiny. Because he would now be in a timeline of a different Lew. And this would account for his lack of memory of his sin. Because in his original timeline, he avoided the sin that has ruined the life of the Lew in this timeline. Where did this Lew go? Who knows?! Perhaps all Lew Basnights have the ability to shift dimensions and they just sort of flip-flop all across infinite realities constantly. We're not concerned with that Lew though. This is the only Lew that matters to us, the readers.
"Avoiding penance and thereby definition"
I'll admit I'm unsure about the meaning of this line. Although why do I feel the need to admit that?! I'm unsure about my interpretation of loads and loads of lines in this novel but that doesn't stop me from blathering on. What is Drave driving at with this line?
Perhaps the "avoiding penance" is the thing that causes Lew to jump timelines. He refuses to face any consequences for his actions in any particular timeline and so he jumps to a new dimension to avoid punishment. And by doing so, he avoids defining himself. Instead of learning from the past and building his personality based on successes and failures, he simply discards his past and begins anew in a new dimension. Discarding one's past could easily be seen as "avoiding definition." What are we if not the sum of our experiences? And then what are we if we bin those experiences whenever we dislike them? We are a blank slate. We are a word with no definition.
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