THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. H. G. Wells
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have compared him to Maxton plus Shelley, rather older, but at the first outset I was reminded of Svengali in Du Maurier’s once popular Trilby. A shaven Svengali. I felt he was FOREIGN, and my instincts about foreigners are as insular as my principles are cosmopolitan. It always seemed to me a little irreconcilable that he was a Balliol scholar, and had been one of the brightest ornaments of our Foreign Office staff before he went to Geneva.
At bottom I suppose much of our essential English shyness is an exaggerated wariness. We suspect the other fellow of our own moral subtleties. We restrain ourselves often to the point of insincerity. I am a rash man with a pen perhaps, but I am as circumspect and evasive as any other of my fellow countrymen when it comes to social intercourse. I found something almost indelicate in Raven’s direct attack upon my ideas.
He wanted to talk about my ideas beyond question. But at least equally he wanted to talk about his own. I had more than a suspicion that he had, in fact, come to me in order to talk to himself and hear how it sounded — against me as a sounding-board.
He called me then a Dealer in the Obvious, and he repeated that not very flattering phrase on various occasions when we met. “You have,” he said, “defects that are almost gifts: a rapid but inexact memory for particulars, a quick grasp of proportions, and no patience with detail. You hurry on to wholes. How men of affairs must hate you — if and when they hear of you! They must think you an awful mug, you know — and yet you get there! Complications are their life. YOU try to get all these complications out of the way. You are a stripper, a damned impatient stripper. I would be a stripper too if I hadn’t the sort of job I have to do. But it is really extraordinarily refreshing to spend these occasional hours, stripping events in your company.”
The reader must forgive my egotism in quoting these comments upon myself; they are necessary if my relations with Raven are to be made clear and if the spirit of this book is to be understood.
I was, in fact, an outlet for a definite mental exuberance of his which it had hitherto distressed him to suppress. In my presence he could throw off Balliol and the Foreign Office — or, later on, the Secretariat — and let himself go. He could become the Eastern European Cosmopolitan he was by nature and descent. I became, as it were, an imaginative boon companion for him, his disreputable friend, a sort of intelligent butt, his Watson. I got to like the relationship. I got used to his physical exoticism, his gestures. I sympathized more and more with his irritation and distress as the Conference at Versailles unfolded. My instinctive racial distrust faded before the glowing intensity of his intellectual curiosity. We found we supplemented each other. I had a ready unclouded imagination and he had knowledge. We would go on the speculative spree together.
Among other gifted and original friends who, at all too rare intervals, honour me by coming along for a gossip, is Mr. J. W. Dunne, who years ago invented one of the earliest and most “different” of aeroplanes, and who has since done a very considerable amount of subtle thinking upon the relationship of time and space to consciousness. Dunne clings to the idea that in certain ways we may anticipate the future, and he has adduced a series of very remarkable observations indeed to support that in his well-known Experiment with Time. That book was published in 1927, and I found it so attractive and stimulating that I wrote about it in one or two articles that were syndicated very extensively throughout the world. It was so excitingly fresh.
And among others who saw my account of this Experiment with Time, and who got the book and read it and then wrote to me about it, was Raven. Usually his communications to me were the briefest of notes, saying he would be in London, telling me of a change of address, asking about my movements, and so forth; but this was quite a long letter. Experiences such as Dunne’s, he said, were no novelty to him. He could add a lot to what was told in the book, and indeed he could EXTEND the experience. The thing anticipated between sleeping and waking — Dunne’s experiments dealt chiefly with the premonitions in the dozing moment between wakefulness and oblivion — need not be just small affairs of tomorrow or next week; they could have a longer range. If, that is, you had the habit of long-range thinking. But these were days when scepticism had to present a hard face to greedy superstition, and it was one’s public duty to refrain from rash statements about these flimsy intimations, difficult as they were to distinguish from fantasies — except in one’s own mind. One might sacrifice a lot of influence if one betrayed too lively an interest in this sort of thing.
He wandered off into such sage generalizations and concluded abruptly. The letter had an effect of starting out to tell much more than he did.
Then he turned up in London, dropped into my study unexpectedly and made a clean breast of it.
“This Dunne business,” he began.
“Well?” said I.
“He has a way of snatching the fleeting dream between unconscious sleep and waking.”
“Yes.”
“He keeps a notebook by his bedside and writes down his dream the very instant he is awake.”
“That’s the procedure.”
“And he finds that a certain percentage of his dream items are — sometimes quite plainly — anticipations of things that will come into his mind out of reality, days, weeks, and even years ahead.”
“That’s Dunne.”
“It’s nothing.”
“But how — nothing?”
“Nothing to what I have been doing for a long time.”
“And that is —?”
He stared at the backs of my books. It was amusing to find Raven for once at a loss for words.
“Well?” I said.
He turned and looked at me with a reluctant expression that broke into a smile. Then he seemed to rally his candour.
“How shall I put it? I wouldn’t tell anyone but you. For some years, off and on — between sleeping and waking — I’ve been — in effect — reading a book. A non-existent book. A dream book if you like. It’s always the same book. Always. And it’s a history.”
“Of the past?”
“There’s a lot about the past. With all sorts of things I didn’t know and all sorts of gaps filled in. Extraordinary things about North India and Central Asia, for instance. And also — it goes on. It’s going on. It keeps on going on.”
“Going on?”
“Right past the present time.”
“Sailing away into the future?”
“Yes.”
“Is it — is it a PAPER book?”
“Not quite paper. Rather like that newspaper of your friend Brownlow. Not quite print as we know it. Vivid maps. And quite easy to read, in spite of the queer letters and spelling.”
He paused. “I know it’s nonsense.”
He added. “It’s frightfully real.”
“Do you turn the pages?”
He thought for a moment. “No, I don’t turn the pages. That would wake me up.”
“It just goes on?”
“Yes.”
“Until you realize you are doing it?”
“I suppose — yes, it is like that.”
“And then you wake up?”
“Exactly. And it isn’t there!”
“And you are always READING?”
“Generally — very definitely.”
“But at times?”
“Oh — just the same as reading a book when one is awake. If the matter is vivid one SEES the events. As if one was looking at a moving picture on the page.”
“But the