Intriguing first sentence in today's Charlottesville Daily Progress interview with Michael Wood about his new book, "The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles." Wood's answer to the question:
- Mostly not, but we do regularly make two quite contradictory assumptions about it: that it is unknowable, and that once it's here, we saw it coming.
Perhaps the best-known oracles in literature are the three weird sisters in Macbeth, who set the standard for riddles that Macbeth calls 'lying like truth' - that is, telling the truth but meaning something else.
Then there is Cassandra, given the gift of prediction by the god Apollo. She then offends him, and is cursed to always make the correct prediction but never to be believed.
Psychoanalysis, when it is working well, creates something like the "inward oracle," writes Wood. That doesn't mean doctors are gods, he hastens to say, only that interpreting what they say can be somewhat like dealing with the ancient Greek oracles: "That is, we can't afford not to believe them, and we don't quite know what they mean."
Sounds like the reaction of any normal person after reading my blog.
I believe that all possible futures exist, and that it is possible to nudge yourself toward one you want. It's not so much a matter of predicting the future, as choosing one.
Article comments
1 - jadester
i, too, am of the "threads of time" theory. At least sort of, that genereal idea anyways. I surely don't believe everything is predetermined