Preparation

“If I prepare myself for some eventuality, you can be pretty sure that it won’t happen.”

Recalls the very well known passage from Proust. The boy Marcel sits down and begins to compose, as an exercise in wish-fulfilment, a letter to himself from his beloved Gilberte. Half way through* he stops:

I had realised that, if I was to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it. And from that moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write to me, from fear lest, by first selecting them myself, I should be excluding just those identical words,–the dearest, the most desired–from the field of possible events

The laws of the universe are so arranged that anything so exactly imagined cannot, on that account, occur. And presumably many fantasies of disaster are presumably attempts to strike such things from the register of the Possible.

*After mentioning this episode to my sister she quips 'whereas now he'll only receive the last part of the letter'.