Our Infinite Fates

While Evelyn laments humanity’s destructiveness, she also notes that the natural world seems little kinder: “Life after life, cruelty after cruelty, and the unbearable weight of being human was beginning to wear me down. The constant cycle of love and loss, as inevitable and natural as the rolling seasons” (13). In fact, the correspondence that she suggests between the highs and lows of human life and the changing of the seasons is as close to resonance as the two ever come. More often than not, nature strikes her as merely detached from human suffering, though it feels to her as if it should not be.

This “apathy” remains constant in the face of both large- and small-scale human tragedies. Evelyn is dismayed by the loss of life in the war and how nature simply carries on, as though nothing is amiss in the world. Of this destruction, she says, “It never failed to amaze me […] that the elements cared not for human pain. That the sky and its stars paid no heed to the obliterated corpses below. That the birds still sang each morning, no matter how many men had fallen the night before” (82). The incredible loss of life feels as though it should impact everything in the world, yet it doesn’t register at all. Similarly, she says of her existence in Wales, “Tragedy struck the Blythe family often and hard, like a river flooding the same sorry houses year after year” (12). Her simile compares the way her family is repeatedly visited by tragedy to the way that a river might flood the same exact areas again and again, despite the damage it’s already inflicted, implying a sense of cosmic injustice: The world does not care that it is doling out suffering disproportionately. 

Thus, in different lifetimes, Evelyn refers to “the indifferent stars” and “the oblivious sunset” when she considers the way that her and Arden’s lives (34, 84)—as well as those of countless others—are permitted to blink out without any apparent change in nature. She is struck by the indifferent beauty of the changing leaves outside the Vermont psychiatric hospital, even as patients are tortured within. During the witch hunts in Norway, she describes how “a pod of whales dance[s] as though human hysteria [is] of no consequence to them” (178). This leads her to realize that “beneath the great canopy of the stars, we [are] nothing” (293), even though we feel like everything. It’s a thought that makes her feel small, both for better and for worse.

The premise of Our Infinite Fates hinges on the mutability of both gender and orientation, at least across lifetimes; Arden and Evelyn live their first lives as women in Ancient Greece but after that are variously reincarnated in differently sexed bodies. Their attraction to one another is constant, however, and neither experiences significant dysphoria in the bodies they inhabit, implying that orientation and gender are fluid, as well as shaped at least in part by circumstance and culture. 

For Evelyn in particular, gender identity ebbs and flows in ways that may be interesting but are ultimately not particularly relevant to her sense of who she and Arden are, individually or together. She calls gender norms “perpetually confusing” because they are constantly changing with time and place and have little to no correspondence to who she feels she actually is. Sex feels equally remote: As she says, “I’m just me. No particular body feels more ‘right’ than the other” (114). She views Arden through a similar lens. In Wales, she thinks, “Arden could be anywhere. Could be anyone” (20). Of Arden’s essential self, Evelyn says, “What fascinated me, what compelled me so profoundly, was that theirs was a soul in the truest sense. A way of thinking, a way of feeling, their emotional contours shifting with culture and history and experience but never yielding entirely” (72). Her use of gender-neutral they/them pronouns to refer to Arden, here and in other passages, captures her sense that sex and gender are not core features of who Arden is in the way that, for example, his love of reading and writing, his thoughtfulness, and his caution are. This shapes her attraction to him. While her attraction to him may take different forms depending on the bodies they are inhabiting—of their time in Nauru, she says, “We’d both been born girls in this life, and I adored the softness of it, all sweet tongues and gentle edges” (47)—she is drawn to him regardless of sex and gender. 

Arden’s orientation is similarly elastic over the centuries, though his sense of sex and gender is somewhat more fixed. He remembers almost every lifetime, but he claims to feel most at home in a male body. While this suggests some limits to gender’s fluidity, it is notable that the first body Arden recalls was male. Evelyn, on the other hand, has forgotten most of their lifetimes: That her sense of identity is more fluid than Arden’s suggests that familiarity can crystallize gender, making it feel more fixed than it is. The names by which the characters largely refer to themselves and each other underscore this point: “Arden” and “Evelyn” were the names that each bore in the first lifetime that Arden remembers, and these are the names they call one another for the next 1,000 years, suggesting that what is merely familiar can come to feel inevitable and unwavering.