Joshua Rothman’s Open Questions column opens with a mundane catastrophe: a sinkhole left by roadwork sends him over the handlebars of his e-scooter, breaking his fibula. Months of bed rest and a wheelchair follow — and the essay turns into a meditation on what chance does to a life, and whether “fate” is anything more than a story we tell afterward.
Rothman reads the small-stuff literature of contingency from his confinement:
- Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine: a novel that unfolds on a single escalator ride, where shoelaces and paper straws matter as much as anything
- Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff: the “sensory enchantment” of paper-cup ridges, vending-machine buttons, and twigs crunching underfoot
- Bogost’s claim that small physical pleasures “resolve the absurdity of the sensory world” — a way of feeling at home in a body and a place
- Harrison Bader’s scooter accident: a Giants outfielder colliding with a fire engine, and how trivial details connect to momentous outcomes
The philosophical core: chance is real, but when fate is actually happening the abstract questions recede. What stands out are the particulars — a paper cup in the hospital waiting room, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “deep, slow-shifting layers of reality where fate is at work,” a hole in the road deciding your life. “So can stepping into the right elevator; I met my wife in one.”
Rothman ends with Boethius on Fortune’s wheel — “If you are trying to stop her wheel from turning, you are of all men the most obtuse” — and a quiet verdict: “As an idea, fate isn’t very logical. But as an experience, it’s as real as it gets.” A good companion to the habit of grounding meaning in the physical world rather than in abstractions.