There is an old intuition, felt by poets and physicists alike, that the conclusion of any story is somehow present at its origin, folded into the first act like a oak within an acorn. “In my beginning is my end,” wrote T.S. Eliot, and the line resonates because it captures something we half-know but struggle to articulate: that the way a thing starts shapes, constrains, and perhaps even determines how it must finish.
This is not quite fatalism, nor is it a denial of agency. It is something subtler, an observation about the architecture of causation itself.
Consider the billiard table. Once the cue strikes the ball, the subsequent collisions, angles, and final resting positions are, in principle, calculable from that first impact. The end state is encoded in the beginning. Laplace famously imagined a demon who, knowing the position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a single moment, could predict all future states and retrodict all past ones. The universe, in this view, is a vast billiard table, and we are balls in motion, our trajectories fixed at the Big Bang.
Modern physics has complicated this picture. Quantum mechanics introduces irreducible randomness; chaos theory shows that tiny differences in starting conditions produce wildly divergent outcomes. And yet, even here, the beginning remains sovereign. Chaotic systems are still deterministic, their unpredictability stems not from freedom but from sensitivity to initial conditions we cannot measure with perfect precision. The butterfly’s wing still determines the hurricane; we simply cannot trace the thread.
The Greeks understood that character is fate. Oedipus’s doom was not merely prophesied; it emerged organically from who he was, proud, relentless, unable to leave a mystery unsolved. Had he been a different man, he might have let the question of his parentage rest. But he could not be a different man. His character was his beginning, and his ruin was its natural expression.
This pattern recurs across literature because it recurs across life. We watch people make choices that seem free in the moment but, in retrospect, appear inevitable given everything we knew about them. The gambler gambles. The martyr martyrs himself. The person who cannot forgive carries that stone until it drags them under. We speak of people being “true to themselves,” and what we mean is that their endings were faithful to their beginnings.
What holds for individuals holds for institutions. The founding documents, early decisions, and original culture of any organization create grooves that subsequent actors find nearly impossible to escape. The compromises embedded in the American Constitution, on slavery, on state power, on representation, played out over centuries in ways the founders could not have predicted but nonetheless set in motion. The Civil War was, in a sense, present at the Constitutional Convention.
Startups calcify around their early assumptions. Nations carry the wounds and habits of their revolutions. A marriage’s early patterns of communication, or avoidance, predict its trajectory decades later. The beginning doesn’t just influence the end; it creates the conditions within which all subsequent choices are made.
If this view seems to leave no room for agency, that is only because we misunderstand what agency means. Freedom is not the absence of causation; it is the capacity to act according to one’s nature, to be the author of one’s own chain of causes. When Spinoza argued that we are determined, he did not counsel despair. He counseled understanding, the recognition that knowing our beginnings gives us power over our ends.
This is, in fact, the practical wisdom contained in the idea that ends are predetermined by beginnings: choose your beginnings carefully. Select the seed with attention, because you will eat the fruit. Set the foundation with care, because you will live in the house. Begin as you mean to go on.
The beginning is not merely the first moment. It is the genetic code of everything that follows, the deep structure that expresses itself through all the apparent chaos of the middle. We are not passive witnesses to this process. We are, at every moment, at the beginning of something. The question is whether we are paying attention.