The probability of the actual is absolute

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

[...]

Our decision do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The low of the world is composed of its entires, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) pp. 287-288