Invisible Hands Weaving My Destiny

 Would to the gods, sad heart of mine, that Fate had a meaning! Would to Fate, rather, that the gods had one!

Sometimes, when I wake up a night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

Here lies my life. Nothing in me disturbs a thing.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 186

Recently I emailed the students in my upcoming fall semester Evil classes, which is something I've started doing to my students to help get things up and running quickly in the semester. One of the subjects that I raised in the email was the question of what evil means now, as compared to what it has meant over the centuries. I usually start of the class by asking them, "When you return to your dorm room and, in fear and exhaustion, tell your roommate, 'Scudder is just evil,' what do you mean? Do you mean it in a demonic sense? That as I passed you in class you caught a whiff of brimstone or you saw 666 in my hairline? No, when you use the term evil, you almost inevitably use it in a psychological or sociological context." The class then is an overview of how our perception of the term has changed over the millennia. However, I also ask the students, "If something has foundational as evil has no definitive, set meaning, then does anything? If evil doesn't actually 'mean' anything, and is only a transitory concept, different from generation to generation, then is God just another transitional concept?" I always tell them that the concept is much less frightening to people of their tender age than to mine. 

Is this essentially what Pessoa is raising in this passage? Does any of this have a meaning? Does Fate (no matter how you define it) or the Divine (no matter how you define it) not have a point? It's easy to think that bad things and good things seem to happen randomly because God had to give us free will - essentially, cutting us loose - otherwise our choices would mean nothing (and wouldn't really be choices, for that matter). There is already enough random horror in today's heavily-armed America, does it have to stretch into the divine realm as well?

And, yes, I just swiped this line from Pessoa for my chapter on the Divine in the Epics book.