Now, I'm going to present a little theory of mine to you, and you see for yourself if it matches your life or not. It seems to me that life, of course, is an empty joke, and that there's no purpose to it atall, and that there's no fate, which is to say anything explicit and definite, along the lines of you're born and you already know that you're going to be a cosmonaut or a ballerina, or that you'll die in your infancy... No, not like that. While you'reliving your allotted time... how do I explain this... It may happen that something happens to you that forces you to perform specific actions and make specific decisions, keeping in mind you have free will, and can do this or that.

But if you make the right decision, then the things that happen to you subsequently are no longer just random, to use your word, events. They are caused by the choices that you made. I don't intend to say that if you decided to live on the Red Line before it went communist that you'd be stuck there and that corresponding events would happen to you. I'm talking of more subtle matters. But if you again were to find yourself at the crossroads and once more made the needed decision, then later you will be faced with a choice that will no longer seem random to you if, of course, you realize and can understand it.

And your life will gradually stop being just a collection of random events; it will turn into . . . a plot, I suppose, where everything is connected by some logical, though not necessarily straight, links. And that will be your fate. At a certain stage, if you have travelled sufficiently far along your way, your life will have turned into a plot to the extent that strange things will occur that are unexplainable from the point of view of naked rationalism or your theory of random events. Yet they will fit very well into the logic of the plot line that your life has by then turned into.

I think fate doesn't just happen, you need to arrive at it, and if the events in your life come together and start to arrange themselves into a plot, then it may cast you quite far... It is most interesting that a person may not even suspect that this is happening to him, or may conceive what has happened based on a false premise, by attempting to systematize events to match his own world view. But fate has its own logic.