Stephen King’s Obdurate Past, My Obdurate Future

Stephen King, in his latest novel 11/22/63, repeatedly refers to the past as being obdurate in nature.  What does he mean by this?

First, you need to understand King’s context here.  11/22/63 is a story about time travel, specifically of someone (the protagonist, Jake Epping) who is able to “step backward” from 2011 to 1958…and then try to prevent John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.  During his struggles to rectify history and make things “right”, he encounters all sorts of inexplicable obstacles to the fulfillment of his quest that seem random and happenstance.  So the past is obdurate, according to Epping’s first person account of his experiences: it does not want to change and will resist efforts by time travelers to alter history, well-intentioned or not.  After reading 11/22/63, I have something to add to Stephen King’s observation regarding the nature of time: it isn’t just the past that is obdurate: so is the future!

I think that there is a good reason that many people believe in the inevitability of fate, in spite of their willful attempts to determine their own destinies.  I myself have had my own personal projects that seemed to be stymied in crucial moments by seemingly unrelated reasons, causing me great discouragement.  But you know, for those endeavors in which I matched time’s stubborn resistance to change with my own stubborn determination to succeed and never gave up, it seemed to have the ultimate effect of “changing time’s mind” to the point where it recognized the new path that I had made for myself as the legitimate progression into the future.  So this obduracy of time may just be a device, implanted within our own consciousness, to filter out the things we actually care enough about to commit ourselves to, even in the face of daunting and arbitrary obstacles.