The first page of Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis:
In the life of every person there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become one actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains beckoning all-around, but it becomes apparent that one’s journey across the meadows has indeed followed a regular path, that one can no longer go this way or that, but that the direction is set, the limits defined.
Each step once taken so thoughtlessly now becomes fraught with tremendous portent, each advance to be made appears unalterable. Looking back across the path we are struck by the inexorability of the road, how every step both limited and served as a condition for the next and viewing the plain we feel with a certainty approaching knowledge that many roads were possible, that many incidents shaped our wandering, that we are here because it was we who journeyed and we could be in a different spot had we wished. And we know further that whatever road we had chosen, we could not have remained stationary. We were unable to avoid in any manner our being now in fact somewhere and in some position. We have come up against the problem of Necessity and Freedom, of the irrevocability of our actions, of the directedness of our life.
What is the meaning of necessity and where does it arise? Necessity is an attribute of the past. Events viewed in retrospect appear inevitable, the fact of occurrence testifies to irrevocability.
From Ch. 34 of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil:
At this moment he wished to be a man without qualities. But this is probably not so very different from what other people sometimes feel too. After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s having come about as it has. It might just as well have turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the least degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them. For in youth life still lies before them as an inexhaustible morning, spread out all round them full of everything and nothing; and yet when noon comes there is all at once something there that may justly claim to be their life now, which is, all in all, just as surprising as if one day suddenly there were a man sitting there before one, with whom one had been corresponding for twenty years without knowing him, and all the time imagining him quite different. But what is still much queerer is that most people do not notice this at all; they adopt the man who has come to stay with them, whose life has merged with their own lives and whose experiences now seem to them the expression of their own qualities, his destiny their own merit or misfortune. Something has had its way with them like a fly-paper with a fly; it has caught them fast, here catching a little hair, there hampering their movements, and has gradually enveloped them, until they lie buried under a thick coating that has only the remotest resemblance to their original shape. And then they only dimly remember their youth when there was something like a force of resistance in them—this other force that tugs and whirrs and does not want to linger anywhere, releasing a storm of aimless attempts at flight.