by C. S. Lewis
Was this nonsense? The childishness of Othertime geography suggested that it might be little better, but then a disquieting thought struck him. How if this race had specialised in the knowledge of time, and ours in the knowledge of space? Might not our conceptions of time, in that event, be as erroneous as the Othertimers’ saucer Earth and airy stars? Scudamour’s own astronomical conceptions would appear as absurd in Othertime as this strange doctrine of temporal angles and fluctuations appeared to him; it would not therefore be untrue. He read on.
‘Let the moment of intersection be X. X will then be a historical moment common to both the times; in other words the total state of the universe in time A at moment X will be identical with the total state of the universe in time B at moment X. Now like states or events have like results. Therefore the whole future of time A (that is, its whole content in the forwards direction) will duplicate the whole future of time B (that is its whole content in the andwards direction).’
Scudamour fancied that he already knew something about duplications; eagerly he turned the page. ‘Here,’ said the book, ‘we are speaking of uncontrolled times; the reader will naturally seek elsewhere for an account of those controlled times which are, of course, of more obvious practical importance.’ Scudamour was only too ready to seek elsewhere. If the library were systematically arranged, the book he wanted must be somewhere near. He took down several volumes. All were concerned with the same subject and in all of them a meaning which he could not seize was implicit. He had almost turned away from this section of the library in despair when at last he took down a book apparently somewhat older than its fellows which stood in the highest shelf and which he had more than once already passed over as unpromising. It had some such title as First Principles.
‘It was anciently believed,’ he read, ‘that space had three dimensions and time but one, and our fathers commonly pictured time as a stream or a thin cord, the present being a moving point on that cord or a floating leaf on that stream. The direction backwards from the present was called the past, as it still is, and the direction forwards the future. What is a little more remarkable is that only one such stream or cord was believed to exist, and that the universe was thought to contain no other events or states than those which occupied, at some point or other, the stream or cord along which our own present is travelling. There were not lacking, indeed, philosophers who pointed out that this was merely a fact of experience and that we could give no reason why time had only one dimension and why there was only a single time; indeed more than one of the early chronologists hazarded the idea that time might itself be a dimension of space—an idea which will seem almost fantastically perverse to us, but which, in their state of knowledge, deserved the praise of ingenuity. In general, however, such interest as the ancients took in time was diverted from fruitful inquiries by their vain efforts to discover means of what they called “time-travel”, by which they meant nothing more than reversal or acceleration of the mind’s movement along our own unilinear time.
‘This is not the place’ (here Scudamour groaned again) ‘to describe the experiments which, in the thirtieth year of the tenth era, convinced chronologists that the time in which we live has lateral fluctuations; in other words that the cord or stream is not to be represented by a straight but by a wavy line. It is difficult for us to realise how revolutionary this discovery at first appeared. So deeply rooted were the old conceptions that we read of thinkers who could not conceive such fluctuation. They inquired in what, or into what, the time cord deviated when it deviated from the straight; and their reluctance to allow the obvious answer (that it deviated in, or into time, in an eckwards or andwards direction) gave a new lease of life to the perverse doctrine we have already noted, which was now called the doctrine of Space Time.
‘Not until the year 47 do we find any clear understanding of the truth, but by 51—’
What followed was a proper name which Scudamour has been unable to tell us, though he recognised it as a proper name while he read. It was one doubtless as familiar to Othertime ears as those of Copernicus and Darwin are to ours; but ‘X’ is the best I can do for it here.
‘—by 51 X had produced a map of time which was essentially correct as far as it went. His time is two-dimensional—a plane which he represented on the map as a square but which he then believed to be of infinite extension. The backwards-forwards direction was from left to right, the eckwards-andwards from top to bottom. Across this our time is shown as a wavy line running predominantly from left to right. Other times, which to him were merely theoretical, are represented by dotted lines running in the same direction above and below—that is to the eckwards and andwards of our time. This diagram was at first the cause of dangerous misunderstandings, which X himself did his best to combat when he published his great Timebook in 57. In it he pointed out that though all the times were diagrammatically represented as starting from the left-hand or backwards side of the square, it must not therefore be assumed that they had a beginning in something timeless. To do so would, in fact, be to forget that the left-hand side of the square must itself represent a time-line. Let the square which represents the plane of two-dimensional time be ABCD, and let XY and OP be two time-lines traversing it in the eckwards-andwards direction. It is clear that if AB and DC represent any reality—that is, if the square is not infinite as he had at first supposed—they also will be time-lines. But it is no less clear that the same is true of AD and BC. There will be times proceeding either from eckwards to andwards or from andwards to eckwards. In that case X and O, which from our point of view are the beginnings of time itself, are in fact simply moments, successive to one another in the AD time. And if the directions of all the four times run the right way—i.e., from A to B, B to C, C to D, D to A—then a consciousness which succeeded in passing, say at Y, from the XY time to the BC, and at C from the BC time to the CD, and so on, would attain to endless time, and the Time Square, though finite, would be endless or perpetual. . . .’
‘I don’t believe a word of it!’ ejaculated Scudamour suddenly, looking up from the book, and then checking himself in some surprise. He had not been prepared for the distaste which had been aroused in him by the kind of immortality which the Othertimers apparently welcomed with enthusiasm. ‘I’d sooner be snuffed out,’ he found himself thinking. ‘I’d sooner go to heaven of harps and angels like what they used to tell me about when I was a boy.’ (No one had, in fact, told him any such thing, but he was under a not uncommon delusion on this subject.) ‘I’d sooner have anything than go round and round that way like a rat in a bucket of water.’ ‘But it might be true all the same,’ whispered his scientific consciousness. He turned once more to the book and read on. After a few pages he found the following.
‘It was left to X’s successors to find the practical bearing of his discovery. In the year 60 Z, who had come to chronology from the study of folklore, propounded the theory that certain fabulous creatures, and other images which constantly appeared in the myths of widely separated peoples and in dreams, might be glimpses of realities which exist in a time closely adjacent to our own. This led to his famous experiment with the Smokehorse. He selected this familiar horror of the nursery because it is almost unique among such images in having arisen in historical times—no evidence having been found of its existence before the last century. By the psychological technique which has since become famous he found that he could produce the Smokehorse, first as a dream, and later as a waking hallucination, in his own consciousness and that of the children on whom he experimented. But he also found that it had altered in various ways from the Smokehorse of tradition, and even from that of his own earliest memories. The old Smokehorse—still favoured in popular art—consists essentially of a small cylindrical body supported on four wheels, and the conspicuous tall spout which emits the smoke. But the Smokehorses seen by Z had very much larger bodies, usually of green, and eight or ten wheels, while the spout had been reduced to a tiny protuberance on the front of t
he cylindrical body. By 66 he had discovered a feature of which tradition and uncontrolled dreams had given no hint, and which therefore put it beyond doubt that he was dealing with some objective reality. He was able to observe that the Smokehorses in drawing their gigantic loads of wheeled vehicles proceeded not along the earth, as had been supposed, but along parallel rods of smooth metal, and that this was the real explanation of their prodigious speed.’
Scudamour, in spite of himself, was now reading too rapidly to take in the full sense of what he read. The next passage that he can remember was something like this.
‘By 69 Z had succeeded in making something like a map of certain portions of our native land as they are in Othertime. The steel roads on which the Smokehorses travel, and which could be comparatively easily traced, gave him his first bearings. He detected the huge Othertime city which occupies what, in our time, are the marshes at the beginning of the Eastwater estuary and traced a complete Smokehorse road from this to our City of the Eastern Plain. More than this he was unable to do because of the conditions under which he worked. He had rightly chosen children as his chief instruments for the inspection of Othertime, because in them the mind is less preoccupied by the ideas and images of our own existence. The experiences of these children had very disagreeable effects, leading to extreme terror and finally to insanity, and most of those whom he used had to be destroyed before they reached maturity. The morals of the period were low—the White Riders had not yet reached even the continental coast—and the government was weak and short-sighted: Z was forbidden to use any children of the more intelligent stocks, foolish restrictions were placed on his disciplinary control of those allotted to him, and in the year 70 this great pioneer fell a victim to assassination.’
‘Thank—’ said Scudamour and then stopped short. The word he had intended was not to be found. He read on.
‘The honours of the next stage in this great discovery are divided between K and Q. K, who worked in the South-western region, concentrated his attention entirely on stationary Smokehorses, of which large collections could be experienced in his area. At first he used adult criminals rather than children, but already the possibility of a different method had occurred to him. He decided to construct in our own time the nearest replica he could of an Othertime Smokehorse. He failed repeatedly because the Othertimers invariably moved their Smokehorse before his model was completed. By this time, however, K had been able to observe the Othertime building in which the stationary Smokehorses were usually kept. With indefatigable patience he set himself to duplicate it in our own time—of course in the exact space occupied by the Othertime building. The results surpassed all expectation. Smokehorses and even Othertime human beings now became faintly, but continuously, visible even to untrained observers. The whole theory of time attraction was thus brought into being, and formulated in K’s law that “Any two time-lines approximate in the exact degree to which their material contents are alike.” It had now become possible, as it were, to bring ourselves at will within sight of an alien time; it still remained to find whether we could produce any effect on it—whether we were within striking distance. K solved the problem by his celebrated “Exchange”. He succeeded in observing an Othertime girl, aged about ten, and living with her parents, under the conditions of extraordinary indulgence which, in Othertime, both the state and the family seem to allow. He then took one of our own children, of the same age and sex, and, as nearly as possible, of the same physical type, and caused it to become conscious of its Othertime counterpart—specially at times when the experiences of the latter would be likely to attract it. At the same time, he treated it with the greatest severity. Having thus produced in its mind a strong wish to change places with the Othertimer, he juxtaposed them, while the latter was asleep, and simply ordered the this-time child to escape him if it could. The experiment succeeded. The child fell asleep and woke with, apparently, no knowledge of its surroundings, and, at first, no fear of K. It continued to ask for its mother, and to beg that it might be allowed to “go home”. Every kind of test was applied, and no doubt need be felt that a real exchange of personalities had taken place. The alien child thus taken from Othertime proved unamenable to our educational methods and was finally used for scientific purposes.’
Scudamour got up and took a turn or two up and down the room. He noticed that the daylight was beginning to fade, and he felt tired, but not at all hungry. His mind was curiously divided—on one side a raging torrent of curiosity, on the other a deep reluctance to read further. The curiosity won, and he sat down again.
‘Meanwhile,’ the book continued, ‘Q had been experimenting with the possibilities of some inanimate instrument which might give us a view of Othertime without the need of the old precarious psychological exertions. In 74 he produced his
[The manuscript breaks off here at the foot of folio 64.]
A NOTE ON THE DARK TOWER
WALTER HOOPER
After an unavailing search for more pages, I showed this fragment to Major Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Roger Lancelyn Green and was disappointed to learn that they had never seen or heard of it. When Roger Lancelyn Green and I were writing C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1974) no one else had seen it, or recognised our description of it in the biography, and I wrongly concluded that it had never been read to the Inklings—the group of friends who met in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms each Thursday evening during term. But, then, Lewis’s friend Gervase Mathew read the manuscript and recognised it at once. He remembers hearing Lewis read the first four chapters at a meeting of the Inklings in 1939 or 1940, and he recalls that the Inklings’ discussion of these chapters centred mainly on the subjects of time and memory, both of which held a strong fascination for Lewis at the time.
Lewis’s friends, and almost everyone else in Oxford, would have understood his references, in the first chapter, to the ‘English ladies at Trianon’ who ‘saw a whole scene from a part of the past long before their birth’ and the book by ‘Dunne’. But they are not well known today and some clarification is probably needed. The ‘English ladies’ were Miss Charlotte Anne Elizabeth Moberley (1846–1937), the Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, from 1886 to 1915, and Miss Eleanor Frances Jourdain (1863–1924), who was Principal of the same college from 1915 to 1924. These distinguished and learned ladies won considerable notoriety in Oxford by publishing in 1911, under the pseudonyms ‘Elizabeth Morison’ and ‘Frances Lamont’, a fascinating book called An Adventure—which ‘adventure’ consisted of their seeing, on their first visit to the Petit Trianon on 10 August 1901, the palace and gardens exactly as they believed they would have appeared to Marie Antoinette in 1792.
This extraordinary ghost-story is not, perhaps, unbelievable, and I understand that Lewis did believe it till, some time later, his friend Dr R. E. Havard mentioned having seen a retraction of it by one of the ladies involved. Lewis had not, till then, heard of any such disclaimer and Dr Havard says that he was ‘disinclined to accept it’. Though Dr Havard is not the only person to believe there had been a retraction (Professor Tolkien was another), the people who know most about Miss Moberley and Miss Jourdain seem never to have heard of it. That being the case, and till there is strong evidence to the contrary, it is perhaps wise to conclude that the ladies stuck to their story for the rest of their lives. While it would appear that Lewis believed the ladies’ testimony while he was writing The Dark Tower, he did not end as he began. Near the end of his life he thought Miss Jourdain’s statements were unreliable.
The other book mentioned in the first chapter, and which struck fire from Lewis’s imagination, is An Experiment with Time (1927) by John William Dunne, an aeronautical experimenter and the exponent of Serialism. In Part III of his book Dunne suggests that all dreams are composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions. In order to corroborate this, he suggests—and this is the ‘experiment’ Orfieu refers to on page 11—that one keep a noteboo
k and pencil under one’s pillow, and that ‘immediately on waking, before you even open your eyes, you set yourself to remember the rapidly vanishing dream’, with the result that, if such a diary is kept over a sufficiently long period, the experimenter will discover such a blending of past and future events. It should be noted, however, that whereas Dunne is saying that a man can, under certain conditions, glance backwards and forwards within his own life, Orfieu is combining this with the belief that you may see into other people’s lives—as the St Hugh’s ladies claim to have done through the mind of the French queen.
Lewis himself had a great many dreams, and experienced frequent occurrences of déjà vu. As, however, his dreams were often nightmares, which he seemed more anxious to forget than remember, I doubt if he attempted Dunne’s ‘experiment’. During the course of the Inklings meeting, and in a subsequent talk with Gervase Mathew in Addison’s Walk (of Magdalen College), Lewis said he believed that déjà vu consisted in ‘seeing’ what you—you only—had at some time merely dreamed.
On the second of these occasions Gervase Mathew suggested that memory, which at times seems to involve precognition, might be an inherited gift, a legacy from one’s ancestors. How far Lewis went along with this it is difficult to say, but the idea appears to have lodged in his mind to come out later in That Hideous Strength, where Jane Studdock has inherited the Tudor gift of second sight, the ability to dream realities. Even the notion of an ‘Othertime’, which is neither our past, present, nor future, was to find its way into his later books—most notably The Chronicles of Narnia. Closer to the time The Dark Tower was written, the ideas found expression in That Hideous Strength (ch. IX, part v), in which the following explanation is offered as to where Merlin was from the fifth century till he woke in the twentieth: ‘Merlin had not died. His life had been hidden, sidetracked, moved out of one-dimensional time, for fifteen centuries . . . in that place where those things remain that are taken off time’s mainroad, behind the invisible hedges, into the unimaginable fields. Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.’