Once, when lunching with young Winston Churchill in 1895, the Chancellor of the Exchequer fashioned a wonderfully weary ormolu dictum: "My dear Winston, the experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens." Churchill, of course, spent a lifetime of 90 years learning that practically everything happens, especially, from time to time, the unthinkable.
Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem, and all that has followed from it, suggests again the ingenuity with which some men and women have approached the seemingly insoluble problem, the historical impossibility. Old impregnable conundrums usually fall to the simplest, most elegant assaults. Alexander's sword at one stroke solved all the mystification of the Gordian knot. Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants—military genius riding through the snow upon absurdity. Gandhi defeated the British raj with a contradiction: nonviolent resistance. In 1955 a weary black woman in Montgomery. Ala., Rosa Parks, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man; at that instant, three centuries of America's racial tragedy began slowly to unravel.
If politics is the art of the possible, then statesmanship can sometimes be a genius for the impossible. Certain leaders over the centuries have understood the necessity of breaking free from old patterns of custom, expectation, even divine ordination. Jefferson suggested as much: "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." Less elegantly, Henry Ford decided: "History is more or less bunk." Civilization of necessity operates by habit. But that process can groove the collective cortex into fatal designs—the ritual—hatreds of Arabs and Israelis, for example.
For much of its career, the world has functioned on the principle of predestined and even tragic inevitability. Most of the planet's religions are steeped in a fatalism that teaches acceptance of dira necessitas, the fearful inevitability of things. The Greeks' Moira, the Romans' fatum, the Muslims' kismet—all enforce the will of an otherworldly plan, against which it is useless to exert a defiant or creative will.
The courage to think and perform the unthinkable is one of the most complicated and powerful of human gifts. It often has the splendor of inspiration and sheer surprise. The development of zero as a tangible number is a breathtaking conception; the idea, like some arithmetical antimatter, was among the forces that eventually propelled man into space. Darwin's thought enforced an intellectual evolution of its own. So did Freud's and Einstein's.