Funny. I'm reading the latest of Walter Mosley's detective novels featuring Leonid McGill, a black private investigator in present-day New York (not an irrelevant comment - race is a big feature in the books) who tends to dwell a lot on fate and our roles in life. I've just read this passage:

"I took a subway toward midtown and my office. The second-to-last car of the A train was empty enough that I could sit on the end, next to the sliding doors. I put in earbuds connected to an ultra-thin MP3 player and listened to the seventies album, Below the Salt, by Steeleye Span, the English folk band. Nasally and dark, mystical and mysterious, the tones seemes to fit my predicament, telling me that the path of my life had been traveled for centuries and who was I to feel so special?"

(I know some of the grammar doesn't quite make sense. It can't be Mosley's fault - he's a great writer. I'm transcribing it from the Kindle edition, so it may have got garbled in the transition).