The present is unavoidable

Martin Amis is a major figure in Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. They were friends from their twenties, with some sticky patches described in the memoir. I'm left with the impression, which I plan to double-check by re-reading Hitch-22 before the year is out, that Hitchens may have done something to alienate Amis at some point, for some passages read like attempts to get back in Amis's good graces.
    At any rate, for an example, here is a mention of Amis in Hitchens's chapter titled "Something of Myself," in which Hitchens answers "The Proust Questionnaire" that seemed to be an office fixture at Vanity Fair magazine, where Hitchens was a contributing editor starting in November 1992:

Your proudest achievement? Since I can't claim the children as solely "mine," being the dedicatee of books by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, and poems by James Fenton and Robert Conquest. [p. 370]

    I've downloaded a half-dozen of Amis's books to listen to, or to at least try to read. I started with his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence. Hitchens doesn't mention the book, but Sean Carroll does in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, in which he cites the novel's telling a story in reverse. Real time can flow only forward, but must a story?
    I think it must. Or for me at least. I listened to about ten pages before growing weary of the game, but not without being impressed with how Amis's narrator dealt with recounting conversations. He learned how to "translate" language heard backward into its forward equivalent. Sort of like decoding Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks by holding them up to a mirror.
    I listened to the beginning of each of the Amis books I'd downloaded, but none of them was dedicated to Christopher Hitchens. I have yet to discover the one (or ones) that were.
    I turned next to Amis's 2001 non-fiction book, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000, which quickly provided a statement that indicted me of some recent idleness I'd engaged in:

It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you will about it, the present is unavoidable.

    The present is unavoidable. It's just the way it had to be. And the Judeo-Christian ethic could not have developed with any more inclusive affirmation of life than it did. "What if" conjectures about its (or anything else's) having been different from what it was are of mostly academic interest. Mostly idle.
    The Amis statement prompted me to revise the conclusion of Sunday's essay, "Them's the breaks":

Like Walter [Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad], we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.^*

    There, less of a muddle, I hope.
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* The original paragraph:

Like Walter, we might individually resist, but happenings continue to roll on just the way they collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.

    That paragraph wasn't literally the conclusion. It was followed by a sort of coda about the unrolling of things' being believed by some as "God's plan in action," with special favors doled out to the believers.
    That idea—that the concept of "God's plan" sprang from the sense that events just happen without our having much or any control over them—deserves an essay of its own.