by Colin Wilson
1. Priestess, The Life and Magic of Dion Fortune, Aquarian Press 1987.
13
The Mystery of Time
IT WAS THE LATE ‘Professor’ Joad who, in his Guide to Modern Thought, used the phrase ‘the undoubted queerness of time’. The case he refers to was recorded by two maiden ladies, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, successive principals of an Oxford college, in their book An Adventure, published in 1911. On August 10, 1901, the two ladies visited the Trianon park at Versailles and were surprised to encounter a number of people in 18th century dress. Two ‘gardeners’ gave them directions, and a man who hurried past them warned them not to take a certain path. They passed a woman in old-fashioned dress who was drawing, but only Miss Moberly saw her. Both ladies felt oddly depressed and experienced a dream-like sensation. They went into the Petit Trianon, followed a wedding party at a distance, then went back to their hotel for tea. A week later, when Miss Moberly was describing the visit in a letter, the two ladies compared notes and decided that there had been something odd about the afternoon. Miss Jourdain wrote her own detailed account. The following January, she returned alone to Versailles on a cold, rainy afternoon. Again she experienced ‘the old eerie feeling’; ‘it was as if I had crossed a line and was suddenly in a circle of influence’. She saw two labourers in bright tunics and hoods loading a cart; when she looked back a second later, they had vanished, although she could see a long way in all directions. She heard the rustling of silk dresses around her and heard voices, but she saw no one.
When the two ladies returned to the gardens three years later, they found everything totally changed. The trees had vanished; so had a rustic bridge, a ravine, a cascade and a ‘kiosk’. Convinced now that they had seen the place as it was in the reign of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, they studied books on the period and concluded that they had actually seen historical personages of the period just before the Revolution, and that the woman seen by Charlotte Moberly could well have been Marie Antoinette. After publication of their book in 1911, three people who had lived in a house overlooking the park at Versailles told them that they had experienced the same kind of thing so often that they had ceased to pay any attention to it.
In 1938, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, J. E. Sturge-Whiting, strongly criticised the account of the two ladies. He had examined the grounds and concluded that they had simply followed paths that still exist on the first occasion and failed to locate them on their second visit. In 1965, Philippe Jullian published a biography of Count Robert de Montesquiou (the dandy on whom Proust based Baron de Charlus), which described how Montesquiou took a house near Versailles in the early 1890s and often spent whole days in the park. His friend Mme de Greffulhe organised a fancy-dress party in the Dairy. And this, remarks Jullian in an aside, could easily explain the ‘adventure’ of the two English ladies. ‘Perhaps . . . the “ghosts” . . . were, quite simply, Mme Greffulhe, dressed as a shepherdess, rehearsing an entertainment with some friends . . .’
The explanation sounds plausible, and together with Sturge-Whiting’s theory of the paths, it so convinced Dame Joan Evans, the literary executor of the two ladies, that she decided to allow An Adventure to go out of print. Yet on closer examination, the two theories still leave nine-tenths of the incidents unexplained. Sturge-Whiting fails to explain away the topographical problem. Charlotte Moberly says quite clearly about her 1904 visit:
‘From this point [the guard house] everything was changed . . . We came directly to the gardener’s house, which was quite different in appearance from the cottage described by Miss Jourdain in 1901 . . . Beyond the gardener’s house was a parterre with flower beds and a smooth lawn of many years’ careful tendance. It did not seem to be the place where we had met the garden officials. We spent a long time looking for the old paths. Not only was there no trace of them, but the distances were contracted . . . The kiosk was gone; so was the ravine and the little cascade which had fallen from a height above our heads, and the little bridge over the ravine . . .’
And so on for several more detailed pages. Which suggests that either the ladies were exaggerating, or Sturge-Whiting must be wrong.
Philippe Jullian apparently failed to check the date of the Versailles adventure. Montesquiou moved to Versailles in the early 1890s and moved again—to Neuilly—in 1894, so the fancy-dress party took place at least seven years too early for the English ladies to have seen a rehearsal.
Finally, Joan Evans makes no attempt to explain what happened on Miss Jourdain’s 1902 visit, when she saw the disappearing carters. On this occasion, Miss Jourdain again saw the ‘old’ Versailles, as on her first visit. During the next two years, she returned many times and must have become fairly familiar with the geography of the park; on all these occasions she found the place completely changed and ‘modernised’.
And so on the Versailles adventure remains one of the most baffling and incongruous incidents in the history of modern psychical research.
Joad concludes: ‘While admitting that the hypothesis of the present existence of the past is beset with difficulties of a metaphysical character . . . I think that it indicates the most fruitful basis for the investigation of these intriguing experiences.’ What exactly did he mean by ‘the present existence of the past’? He never bothered to explain. But the phrase seems to suggest a notion that is not too difficult to grasp: that the past is somehow alive and still among us, like the voice of Caruso preserved on gramophone records.
In fact, as we have seen, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, and his disciple William Denton, meant roughly the same thing by ‘psychometry’ (Chapter 3), and Denton even coined the phrase ‘telescope into the past’. But then, psychometry is not literally the ability to see into the past—any more than a gramophone stylus is a time machine that can transport you back into the life of Caruso. If the faculty exists—and there is much convincing evidence that it does—then it could be explained simply as a very highly developed ability to ‘read’ the history of objects, rather as Sherlock Holmes was able to tell Watson the history of his alcoholic brother from the evidence of his watch. And this, I suspect, is not precisely what Joad meant by the ‘undoubted queerness of time’. For, in the section before his account of the ‘adventure’ of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, he discusses J.W. Dunne’s book An Experiment with Time; and Dunne’s book is an account of how he had certain clear and detailed dreams of the future. If Dunne’s book is to be believed—and, again, he had a reputation for integrity—then he dreamed of such events as the great Martinique earthquake some weeks before it happened. And this is utterly unexplainable on any ‘scientific’ theory of time, no matter how abstract and complex: the scientists’ view of time dictates that the future cannot affect the past. I may be able to explain certain personal premonitions—say, the death of a relative—in logical terms (i.e., I knew he was ill and suffered from a bad heart), but to dream of a volcanic explosion on an island you know nothing about is obviously an event of a different order.
There, then, is the problem. The files of the Society for Psychical Research and the College of Psychic Studies are full of convincing cases or premonitions of the future and curious visions of the past. The two examples that follow both concern the same man: Air-Marshal Sir Victor Goddard.
In 1935, when he was a Wing Commander, Goddard was sent to visit a disused First World War airfield at Drem, near Edinburgh. It proved to be in a state of dilapidation, with disintegrating hangars and cracked tarmac. Cattle grazed on the old airfield. Later that day Goddard took off in his Hawker Hart biplane from Turnhouse, Edinburgh, to head for home. But he soon encountered thick cloud and heavy rain, and as he tried to descend below the cloud ceiling the plane spun for a few moments out of control. He managed to straighten out close to the ground—so close that he almost hit a woman who was running with a pram. Ahead of him was the Firth of Forth, and Goddard decided to head for Drem airfield to get his bearings.
It was still raining heavily as he cross
ed the airfield boundary. Then an odd thing happened: he suddenly found himself in bright sunlight. And Drem airfield was no longer an overgrown field, but a neat, orderly place, with four yellow planes parked in front of open hangar doors and mechanics in blue overalls walking around. Both these things surprised Goddard, for in those days all RAF planes were painted with aluminium and mechanics wore khaki overalls. Moreover the mechanics did not even glance up as the plane roared a few feet overhead: Goddard had the feeling that they did not see him. He also had the feeling of ‘something ethereal about the sunlight’.
When he landed he told his immediate superior about his ‘hallucination’, and was advised to lay off the whisky. So Goddard said nothing about his ‘vision’ in his official report. It was not until four years later, when war broke out, that he received an even greater shock. Next time he saw Drem it had been transformed into the airfield of his vision. The ‘trainers’ were now painted yellow and the mechanics wore blue overalls. A monoplane he had failed to recognise four years earlier he now identified as a Miles Magister.
Recordings from the past are a reality, as every film and gramophone record demonstrates. But a recording from the future sounds preposterous. Even if we assume it was a hallucination, and not a ‘time-slip’ into the future, it remains just as impossible.
The second episode concerns a glimpse of the more immediate future.
In 1946 Sir Victor Goddard was attending a party given in his honour in Shanghai. He was talking to some friends when he overheard someone behind him announcing that he—Goddard— was dead. He turned round and found himself looking into the face of a British naval commander, Captain Gerald Gladstone. Gladstone immediately recognised him, and looked appalled. ‘I’m terribly sorry! I do apologize!’ ‘But what made you think I was dead?’ ‘I dreamt it.’
Gladstone went on to describe his dream. He had seen the crash of a transport passenger plane, perhaps a Dakota, on a rocky coast: it had been driven down by a terrible snowstorm. In addition to its RAF crew the plane also carried three civilians, two men and a women: they had emerged from the plane, but Air Marshal Goddard had not. Gladstone had awakened with a strong conviction that Goddard was dead, and throughout that day he expected to hear the news.
Goddard was not too worried: he was due to fly to Tokyo in a Dakota, but there would be no civilians on board. He and Gladstone spent a pleasant half hour or so discussing Dunne’s theory of time. But during dinner there were alarming developments. A Daily Telegraph journalist asked if he could beg a lift to Japan. Then the Consul General told Goddard that he had received orders to return to Tokyo immediately and asked if he could travel too; he also asked if they could find room for a female secretary. With deep misgivings, Goddard agreed. And when the plane took off from Shanghai, he personally had no doubt whatever that he was about to die.
The Dakota was caught in heavy cloud over mountains—another detail Captain Gladstone had ‘seen’—then ran into a fierce snowstorm. Finally the pilot was forced to crash-land on the rocky coastline of an island off the shore of Japan. But Gladstone proved to be mistaken about Goddard’s death: everyone on board survived.
Such incidents flatly contradict everything that human beings know—intuitively—about time. The one thing that is absolutely certain about our world is that everything that is born ends eventually by dying, and that, in between these two events, it gets steadily older. Time is irreversible. With the aid of a tape recorder, I can replay the voice of someone who is dead; but, if I happen to feel guilty about the way I have treated him, there is absolutely no way in which I can go back in time and ‘unhappen’ what has happened. We all know this. It is not only a fundamental part of our experience; it seems to be a law of the Universe.
Now when, in 1895, H.G. Wells wrote his science-fiction story The Time Machine he introduced his readers to an exciting and fascinating new hypothesis. Time, says Wells’s Time Traveller, is nothing more than a fourth dimension of space. Consider photographs of a man at the ages of 8, 15, 17, 23, and so on. These are basically three-dimensional representations of a four-dimensional being, rather as you might take slices or cross-sections of a length of soft clay. What this implies is that each cross-section is in some way false or, at least, misleading—exactly as those flat Egyptian portraits of solid human beings are misleading. Seen from the perspective of the fourth dimension, a man is a single chunk of matter stretching from one point in time to another, not a three-dimensional chunk of matter moving from one moment to the next.
One of the Time Traveller’s companions objects that we cannot move about in time; whereupon he makes an interesting reply: ‘You are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course, we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may even be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way . . . ?’
The Traveller, of course, claims to have invented a machine for doing precisely this. But the interesting point of the above explanation is that it suggests a quite different method of time travel. Wells says that when we recall an event vividly, we move back into the past for a moment; but we have no capacity to stay there. Time, he says, in another paragraph, is essentially mental travel from the cradle to the grave. What Wells is suggesting is that time travel is a mental faculty we already possess, but to a very slight extent.
Wells himself apparently forgot that important suggestion, thrown off casually in the opening chapter of The Time Machine. And the remainder of his story—with its mechanical flight through time—raises the kind of paradoxical questions that have become a commonplace of science fiction ever since. For example, as he moves into the future, he sees his housekeeper come into the room and move across it with the speed of a bullet: for now he is moving more swiftly through time, her action happens in a shorter space of time. If he had been going backwards in time, he would have seen her move across the room backwards, her actions reversed. But then, would he not also have seen himself, as he was a few minutes before, or the day or month before? In fact, what was to prevent him halting the Time Machine and going to shake hands with his ‘self of yesterday? Or why should he not go forward to his self of tomorrow and ask him what horse won the Grand National? He could even ask his self of tomorrow and his self of yesterday to climb into the Time Machine and accompany him back to today for dinner . . .
And already we see the emergence of the paradox. What right has the Time Traveller to regard his own time as the present, and his own ‘self as the Time Traveller? Wells sidesteps this question by sending the Traveller backwards or forwards in time beyond his own life span. So if he went back to 1812 to meet Napoleon or 1066 to meet King Harold, it would sound perfectly logical, if unbelievable. But if the Time Traveller consists of millions of ‘selves’, one for every split second of his life, then the same goes for every other person and object in the Universe. The trouble with this is that every one of these multiple beings would have its own past and future, since each is a separate individual. (For example, if the Time Traveller invited his selves of yesterday and tomorrow for dinner, each would proceed to travel into the future separately as three separate beings.) You end up with an absurd vision of a multiple-multiple Universe in which everyone is fragmented into an infinite number of selves . . .
It is, of course, mere fiction, so we can forgive its shortcomings. But then, the actual experience of time travel is not mere fiction. I suggested, for example, that the Time Traveller of today might pay a call on his self of tomorrow to enquire the winner of the Grand National; he could then go back to his own time and place a large bet on it . . . But such events have, in
fact, occurred. In 1976 I made a television programme for BBC2 about John Godley, Lord Kilbracken, who, as an Oxford undergraduate, dreamed winners of horse races, and made several useful sums of money through his curious ability. Peter Fairley, the science correspondent of Independent Television, had a similar experience. In a BBC broadcast, he told how, as he was driving to work one day in 1965, he heard a request on the car radio for a Mrs Blakeney; he had just driven through the village of Blakeney, and a few minutes later, heard a reference to another—totally unconnected—Blakeney. At the office he heard the name again, this time a horse running in the Derby. He backed it and it won. From then on, he explained, he could pick winners merely by looking down a list of horses; the winner would ‘leap off the page’ at him. He said that as soon as he began to think about it and worry about it, the faculty vanished . . .
Now this is altogether closer to Wells’s suggestion of Time Travel as a purely mental faculty. And it is certainly far more convincing than the version involving time machines.
Let us, then, agree that the usual notion of time travel, derived from Wells, is absurd and self-contradictory. In that sense, the past is the past and the future is the future, and we can never hope to explore either with the aid of a Time Machine. For in this sense, time does not exist; it is a semantic misunderstanding. I tried to explain the reason for this in a passage of my book The Occult. Suppose people were born on moving trains and stayed on them until they died. They might invent a word to describe the everyday sensation of scenery flowing past the window, a word like ‘zyme’. When the train stops in stations they would say that zyme has halted; if the train reverses, they would say zyme is flowing backwards. But if someone spoke of zyme as an entity, they would obviously be committing a logical error; it consists of many things—a railway carriage, scenery, motion and so on. The same goes for time. It is basically a process which involves physical objects. If you think of a completely ‘empty’ Universe, or a completely static Universe, it would obviously have no time. This is why Wells’s time machine is an absurdity.
