I bought a novel the first Saturday of spring break to read in my spare moments and am now completely and unequivocally in love with it. It has enraptured me. It's call Winter's Tale by Mark Heplin. It's pretty long, 748 pages. At first, I bought and was intrigued by it despite it's length, but now the fact that it's so long makes me enjoy it even more because it means I get to keep reading it for a long time.

All this to say that I just read a cool/interesting part on p. 401 that I want to share:
If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been givien--so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece . . .The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is--and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in percieving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

I think that is beautiful. The whole book is beautiful. The story is so intricate. And, as this above passage suggests, everything and everyone effects it all. You should give it a read.