The Arachnid

“Do you remember there being this much grass last year?” He turned to me.

“Looks like there’s more water.” The gentle noise of streams flowing into the caldera murmured as we stared

at the lake.

“It’s warmer this year.”

“You think?”

“Look at yourself.” He gestured to the sweat stain left by my pack. I could feel its coolness around me, a

breeze from the water pressing the damp cloth against my body.

“It was hailing last year. Do you remember the wind?” The image of our party walking single file, under

assault from the elements on the South face of Mt. Siyeh came to me.

“It must just be a warmer summer.” We nodded. A simple conclusion—digestible. We took up our packs and

began the trail back towards our camp in Cut Bank, East Glacier.

I barely slept that night. Meandering the border between rest and reality, I found myself recalling those

words: “It must just be a warmer summer.” I hadn’t spoken at all on the way back—couldn’t. The setting sun

against the Blackfeet reservation made the plains look as if they were ablaze with wildfires —beautiful reds

and oranges being devoured by the fatal shadow of the continental divide. It evoked in me a quiet fear,

permeating my thoughts and driving me into silence. I recalled a similar dread crystalizing in my veins upon

viewing the remains of Sólheimajökull: the “climate glacier.” Small fixtures of ice jutted from the black earth

outlining the skeleton of the once stoic glacier. As I walked among the spires, the tedious beat of melting ice

falling into enclosed puddles beneath droned like a dental drill etching closer to the root—a sterile sense of

disquiet. I felt, in that moment, the sense that the earth was baring its teeth against its ruthless inhabitants; a

future of ash-covered skyscrapers and canoes on Wall Street lay before my imagination.

I cannot entirely attribute, however, this particular dread to the fear of changing climate: I recall waking on an

irregularly cold morning in Houston to the news that Ukraine had been invaded, feeling the same numb dread

as I had sweating on the Canadian Border. It is a placeless, all encroaching fear that stands monolithically

against the other concerns of the 21st century.

I winced after he said it: “I can’t really see myself getting married soon. I also don’t think I’d want to have

kids in a world like this.” I found it cliche—a dead and well beaten horse of sentiment.

“I just don’t think it's as easy as it used to be, financially you know?” He looked at me hoping for agreement.

It was September in Austin; I could see the sweat beading in his hair as he waited for validation. My eyes

must have been vacant as he quickly changed the subject—coffee with a friend turned sour and bleak.

Yes, it was cliche, but I saw in that moment, months after returning from Glacier, another manifestation of

that unnamed dread. While it was the uncanny heat in December and rising foreign conflict that had

paralyzed me, it was the volatility of his accounts, his various credit lines, and his investments in a declining

American market that rendered him incapable of hoping for a prosperous future. We were possessed by

distinct fears. We finished our conversation, however, entangled in the same web—one spun by a subtle

enemy: fatalism.

Subconsciously pervading our conception of reality, fatalism is the philosophical position that our individual

and collective futures are predetermined and entirely out of our control. This philosophy does not discount

the supernatural but rather suggests that whatever divine powers may be do not have humanity’s interests at

heart. Fatalism attacks almost every aspect of our society, eroding our trust in government, economic security,

and—the most detrimental—relationships. While the effects of this insidious philosophy can be seen

throughout The West, it has chosen relationships to target with concentrated effort; the most undermined

being romantic ones.

Like a hopeless diagnosis, the promise of fatalism is a bleak and uninhabitable future—but a future you will

learn to accept. This notion seems to completely invalidate the pursuit of romance as it stunts its intended

progression, obscuring the future and discouraging a couple from investing in it. Fatalism utilizes our social

concerns—visions of a hostile world in my case or economic distress in my friend’s—as venom, populating

our minds with anything but hope. Compromised in this state, the idea of committing to another soul for the

rest of our lives seems absurd. Within this crisis however, a distortion in our understanding of romantic love

becomes clear.

Solomon, an ancient ruler of Israel, considers the intensity of romance and commemorates it in his writing,

exclaiming, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy as

fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord.”1 Both lofty and evocative in

delivery, this passage presents a crucial truth about the nature of love: it is inherently aggressive. Presenting it

as “the very flame of the Lord,” Solomon is inferring that love is not passive, not simply a circumstantial

affection, and most importantly not at the whim of circumstance. While this may be evident in theory, it has

sorely lacked representation in practice. How then has Solomon’s view of romantic love been distorted to

allow for fatalism to render it obsolete?

In recollecting that hollow, desolate fear I felt walking back from the caldera—the sweat against my body, the

sun burning the plains—I used to ask myself a simple yet grave question: “Is it worth it?” Worth it to love,

worth it to invest, worth it to trust? But I’ve realized, to some extent, the futility of this question. We have

distorted romance by making it contingent on the future—this is why fatalism has dealt such damage. It has

convinced the West that love is like any other investment: without time to mature, it is futile and ill-advised.

Decoupling from this economic posture towards romance is essential for both the religious and secular West

if we are to restore what fatalism has corrupted. If we only pursue lifelong commitment to another when the

future is secure, then we will forever remain ensnared in its hostility. If romantic love is separated from our

insecurity, however, it will always be worth it. Even if it is cut short, strained, made virtually impossible—it

will always be worth it. While it may be a tenuous denial of pragmatism in some sense, maybe romance was

never meant to be a pragmatic endeavor to begin with.