Death speaks:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, please lend me your horse and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.”
The merchant lent him his horse and the servant dug his spurs in its flanks and he went to Samarra as fast as the horse could gallop. Then the merchant went down to the market place and saw me standing in the crowd and approached me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”
“That was not a threatening gesture,” I replied, “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him in Samarra.”
The above thought-provoking parable was offered by the English novelist William Somerset Maugham to express the absurdity of free will. Maugham’s homily is more in line with predestination, the point being made that there is a sense of inevitability in life’s drama. Although we may think we are freely going about our business, we are actually under the control of hidden masters. Some of the greatest minds in every generation have grappled with the problem of free will and determinism, and no one to date has proposed a satisfactory solution. Perhaps our brains are sophisticated enough to conceive of the problem but not advanced enough to solve it.