Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere?

On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself.

There are very audible echoes of Peter Newbrook's The Asphyx and even Peter Sasdy's The Stone Tape, scripted by Nigel Kneale in The Breakthrough, though it's actually based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story that predates both of them. Written in 1964 as a favour to Kingsley Amis who was looking to put together an anthology of science fiction stories that was never published, the short story turned up in Du Maurier's 1971 collection Not After Midnight, and Other Stories. Graham Evans' television play, adapted by Clive Exton, is faithful to the story but possibly as a consequence it's far too leisurely for its own good.

Computer specialist Stephen Saunders (Simon Ward) is sent by a government minister, Sir John Fowler (Anthony Nicholls), to a laboratory, Saxmere, situated on the salt marshes of the East Suffolk Coast, ostensibly to help maintain it's fantastically clunky and oh-so-70s computer - all oscilloscopes, huge reels of tape and inexplicable banks of flashing lights. It turns out that the Saxmere team, made up of "Mac" Maclean (Brewster Mason), Robbie (Clive Swift), Janus (Roy Boyd), Ken (Thomas Ellice, here credited as Martin C. Thurley) and Cerberus the dog are trying to use the computer to help them capture human psychic energy (or "Force 6" as Mac dubs it) at the very moment of death. The terminally ill Ken is chosen as the test subject and a developmentally challenged young local girl, Niki (Rosalind McCabe), who shows some talent as a medium and seems to have caused poltergeist activity in the past, is drafted in to act as a conduit to him after he dies. The experiment seems to be a success but Niki reports back that Ken wants his life force released and the researchers realise with horror that their process captures more than just psychic energy.

— Kevin Lyons — EOFFTV - The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television

Paperhouse is a 1988 British dark fantasy film directed by Bernard Rose. It was based on the 1958 novel Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. The film stars Ben Cross, Glenne Headly and Gemma Jones. The original novel was the basis of a six-episode British TV series for children in the early 1970s which was titled Escape Into Night.

While suffering from glandular fever, 11-year-old Anna Madden draws a house. When she falls asleep, she has disturbing dreams in which she finds herself inside the house she has drawn. After she draws a face at the window, in her next dream she finds Marc, a boy who suffers with muscular dystrophy, living in the house. She learns from her doctor that Marc is a real person.

Anna sketches her father into the drawing so that he can help carry Marc away, but she inadvertently gives him an angry expression which she then crosses out, and the father (who has been away a lot and has a drinking problem, putting a strain on his marriage) appears in the dream as a furious, blinded ogre. Anna and Marc defeat the monster and shortly afterward Anna recovers, although the doctor reveals that Marc’s condition is deteriorating.

Anna’s father returns home and both parents seem determined to get over their marital difficulties. The family goes on holiday by the sea, where Anna finds an epilogue to her dream.

Charlotte Burke - Anna Madden, Ben Cross - Dad, Glenne Headly - Kate Madden, Elliott Spiers - Marc, Gemma Jones - Dr. Sarah Nichols, Jane Bertish - Miss Vanstone, Samantha Cahill - Sharon, Sarah Newbold - Karen.

Marianne Dreams is a children’s fantasy novel by Catherine Storr. It was illustrated with drawings by Marjorie-Ann Watts and published by Faber and Faber in 1958. The first paperback edition, from Puffin Books in 1964, is catalogued by the Library of Congress as revised.

Marianne is a young girl who is bedridden with a long-term illness. She draws a picture to fill her time and finds that she spends her dreams within the picture she has drawn. As time goes by, she becomes sicker, and starts to spend more and more time trapped within her fantasy world, and her attempts to make things better by adding to and crossing out things in the drawing make things progressively worse. Her only companion in her dreamworld is a boy called Mark, who is also a long-term invalid in the real world.

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. He is best-known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

By way of an Introduction:

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled "The End of History?" which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government", and as such constituted the "end of history". That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today's stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

The original article excited an extraordinary amount of commentary and controversy, first in the United States, and then in a series of countries as different as England, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and South Korea. Criticism took every conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of my argument. Many people were confused in the first instance by my use of the word "history". Understanding history in a conventional sense as the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as evidence that "history was continuing", and that I was ipso facto proven wrong.

And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. This understanding of History was most closely associated with the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. It was made part of our daily intellectual atmosphere by Karl Marx, who borrowed this concept of History from Hegel, and is implicit in our use of words like "primitive" or "advanced," "traditional" or "modern", when referring to different types of human societies. For both of these thinkers, there was a coherent development of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical "progress".

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it an effort to continue the discussion with that article's many critics and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the "struggle for recognition".

It is of course not sufficient to appeal to the authority of Hegel, Marx, or any of their contemporary followers to establish the validity of a directional History. In the century and a half since they wrote, their intellectual legacy has been relentlessly assaulted from all directions. The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of human life is philosophically intelligible. We in the West have become thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall progress in democratic institutions. This profound pessimism is not accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first half of the twentieth century - two destructive world wars, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and the turning of science against man in the form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage. The life experiences of the victims of this past century's political violence - from the survivors of Hitlerism and Stalinism to the victims of Pol Pot - would deny that there has been such a thing as historical progress. Indeed, we have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognising good news when it comes.

And yet, good news has come. The most remarkable development of the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the revelation of enormous weaknesses at the core of the world's seemingly strong dictatorships, whether they be of the military-authoritarian Right, or the communist-totalitarian Left. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, strong governments have been failing over the last two decades. And while they have not given way in all cases to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles in economics - the "free market" - have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe.

All of these developments, so much at odds with the terrible history of the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right and Left were on the march, suggest the need to look again at the question of whether there is some deeper connecting thread underlying them, or whether they are merely accidental instances of good luck. By raising once again the question of whether there is such a thing as a Universal History of mankind, I am resuming a discussion that was begun in the early nineteenth century, but more or less abandoned in our time because of the enormity of events that mankind has experienced since then. While drawing on the ideas of philosophers like Kant and Hegel who have addressed this question before, I hope that the arguments presented here will stand on their own.

This volume immodestly presents not one but two separate efforts to outline such a Universal History. After establishing in Part I why we need to raise once again the possibility of Universal History, I propose an initial answer in Part II by attempting to use modern natural science as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence of History. Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous. The progressive conquest of nature made possible with the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proceeded according to certain definite rules laid down not by man, but by nature and nature's laws.

The unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it, for two reasons. In the first place, technology confers decisive military advantages on those countries that possess it, and given the continuing possibility of war in the international system of states, no state that values its independence can ignore the need for defensive modernisation. Second, modern natural science establishes a uniform horizon of economic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernisation must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralised state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of social organisation like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries indicate that while highly centralised economies are sufficient to reach the level of industrialisation represented by Europe in the 1950s, they are woefully inadequate in creating what have been termed complex "post-industrial" economies in which information and technological innovation play a much larger role.

But while the historical mechanism represented by modern natural science is sufficient to explain a great deal about the character of historical change and the growing uniformity of modern societies, it is not sufficient to account for the phenomenon of democracy. There is no question but that the world's most developed countries are also its most successful democracies. But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialisation should produce political liberty. Stable democracy has at times emerged in pre-industrial societies, as it did in the United States in 1776. On the other hand, there are many historical and contemporary examples of technologically advanced capitalism coexisting with political authoritarianism from Meiji Japan and Bismarckian Germany to present-day Singapore and Thailand. In many cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic growth unachievable in democratic societies.

Our first effort to establish the basis for a directional history is thus only partly successful. What we have called the "logic of modern natural science" is in effect an economic interpretation of historical change, but one which (unlike its Marxist variant) leads to capitalism rather than socialism as its final result. The logic of modern science can explain a great deal about our world: why we residents of developed democracies are office workers rather than peasants eking out a living on the land, why we are members of labor unions or professional organisations rather than tribes or clans, why we obey the authority of a bureaucratic superior rather than a priest, why we are literate and speak a common national language.

But economic interpretations of history are incomplete and unsatisfying, because man is not simply an economic animal. In particular, such interpretations cannot really explain why we are democrats, that is, proponents of the principle of popular sovereignty and the guarantee of basic rights under a rule of law. It is for this reason that the book turns to a second, parallel account of the historical process in Part III, an account that seeks to recover the whole of man and not just his economic side. To do this, we return to Hegel and Hegel's non-materialist account of History, based on the "struggle for recognition".

According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and above all the preservation of their own bodies. Man differs fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be "recognised." In particular, he wants to be recognised as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts - chief among them his instinct for self-preservation - for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals. According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other "recognise" their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or "spiritedness." Much of human behaviour can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today's popular language we would call "self-esteem." The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

By Hegel's account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a "contradiction" that engendered further stages of history.

Hegel believed that the "contradiction" inherent in the relationship of lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and, one would have to add, American revolutions. These democratic revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave by making the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The inherently unequal recognition of masters and slaves is replaced by universal and reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognises the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, and where that dignity is recognised in turn by the state through the granting of rights.

This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest - desire combined with reason - and particularly the desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, because what truly satisfies human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions, Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process - the struggle for recognition - has now been satisfied in a society characterised by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.

The desire for recognition, then, can provide the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics that was missing from the economic account of History in Part II. Desire and reason are together sufficient to explain the process of industrialisation, and a large part of economic life more generally. But they cannot explain the striving for liberal democracy, which ultimately arises out of thymos, the part of the soul that demands recognition. The social changes that accompany advanced industrialisation, in particular universal education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status. If people were nothing more than desire and reason, they would be content to live in market-oriented authoritarian states like Franco's Spain, or a South Korea or Brazil under military rule. But they also have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognising their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realisation that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.

An understanding of the importance of the desire for recognition as the motor of history allows us to reinterpret many phenomena that are otherwise seemingly familiar to us, such as culture, religion, work, nationalism, and war. Part IV is an attempt to do precisely this, and to project into the future some of the different ways that the desire for recognition will be manifest. A religious believer, for example, seeks recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a nationalist demands recognition for his particular linguistic, cultural, or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between human social groups. For this reason, religion, nationalism, and a people's complex of ethical habits and customs (more broadly "culture") have traditionally been interpreted as obstacles to the establishment of successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.

But the truth is considerably more complicated, for the success of liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome. For democracy to work, citizens need to develop an irrational pride in their own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville called the "art of associating," which rests on prideful attachment to small communities. These communities are frequently based on religion, ethnicity, or other forms of recognition that fall short of the universal recognition on which the liberal state is based. The same is true for liberal economics. Labor has traditionally been understood in the Western liberal economic tradition as an essentially unpleasant activity undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction of human desires and the relief of human pain. But in certain cultures with a strong work ethic, such as that of the Protestant entrepreneurs who created European capitalism, or of the elites who modernised Japan after the Meiji restoration, work was also undertaken for the sake of recognition. To this day, the work ethic in many Asian countries is sustained not so much by material incentives, as by the recognition provided for work by overlapping social groups, from the family to the nation, on which these societies are based. This suggests that liberal economics succeeds not simply on the basis of liberal principles, but requires irrational forms of thymos as well.

The struggle for recognition provides us with insight into the nature of international politics. The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire. The relationship of lordship and bondage on a domestic level is naturally replicated on the level of states, where nations as a whole seek recognition and enter into bloody battles for supremacy. Nationalism, a modern yet not-fully-rational form of recognition, has been the vehicle for the struggle for recognition over the past hundred years, and the source of this century's most intense conflicts. This is the world of "power politics," described by such foreign policy "realists" as Henry Kissinger.

But if war is fundamentally driven by the desire for recognition, it stands to reason that the liberal revolution which abolishes the relationship of lordship and bondage by making former slaves their own masters should have a similar effect on the relationship between states. Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognised as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognised as equal. A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another's legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. Nationalism is currently on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world's oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.

The fifth and final part of this book addresses the question of the "end of history," and the creature who emerges at the end, the "last man." In the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of Liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel's great interpreter, Alexandre Kojève, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he called the "universal and homogeneous state" - what we can understand as liberal democracy - definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of history - what had driven the prior "stages of history" - was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was "completely satisfied." This claim was made seriously by Kojève, and it deserves to be taken seriously by us. For it is possible to understand the problem of politics over the millennia of human history as the effort to solve the problem of recognition. Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate. But while it has a dark side, it cannot simply be abolished from political life, because it is simultaneously the psychological ground for political virtues like courage, public-spiritedness, and justice. All political communities must make use of the desire for recognition, while at the same time protecting themselves from its destructive effects. If contemporary constitutional government has indeed found a formula whereby all are recognised in a way that nonetheless avoids the emergence of tyranny, then it would indeed have a special claim to stability and longevity among the regimes that have emerged on earth.

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies "completely satisfying?" The long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation's absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution's commitment to human equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a "last man" who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced "men without chests," composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognised as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.

Following Nietzsche's line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a "last man" with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the "peace and prosperity" of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible "last men" not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial "first men" engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?

This books seeks to address these questions. They arise naturally once we ask whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can construct a coherent and directional Universal History of mankind. Totalitarianisms of the Right and Left have kept us too busy to consider the latter question seriously for the better part of this century. But the fading of these totalitarianisms, as the century comes to an end, invites us to raise this old question one more time.

Home movie — The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe.

I THINK THAT MY CHIEF SURPRISE is that it’s all happening, as they say. The preliminaries have been so protracted and the idea so threatened by various aspects of the malaise affecting the film industry generally, that Peter Hall and my-self, glancing at each other across the farmyard, often find it amazing that we are actually shooting Akenfield. Initially I had great reservations about filming the book at all. In the first place, the tendency of film companies or television to want to turn every successful book into a picture is questionable. Writers are often mangled in the process. Anthony Burgess continues to protest about what occurred to his novel A Clockwork Orange when the film-makers got hold of it. My book presented unique difficulties inasmuch as it involved many friends and neighbours as well as deeply personal experiences drawn from a whole lifetime in the Suffolk countryside. Also, there was the problem of continuity; how did one film three generations in terms of work, belief, education and climate. For this is what Akenfield is really concerned with.

I met Peter Hall in London a few weeks after the book had been published and he told me of his Suffolk home; how my work had touched a deeply personal element in his life, and how, like all creative people, he felt a great need to express important things concerning himself and his family in artistic terms. He thought that a film based on Akenfield might achieve this. There would be no actors and as little as necessary of the general elaborations which accompany the making of a big film. That autumn I wrote a script based on the ideas in the book, on what people said and did. Roughly speaking, the pattern of this script involves a day in the past and a day in the present, a day of life and a day of death, and a day of summer and a day of winter. Within this pattern a century of Suffolk life works itself to a present-day conclusion.

It is a feature film and not a documentary, although every-body in it would be ploughing, shoeing, praying, marrying, harvesting, teaching, rook-scaring, factory-farming, digging up the past or concealing the present with all the actuality which the camera could catch. Peter Hall and I talked of Robert Bresson and his remarkable films of French country life. I even mentioned Man of Aran. A Suffolk friend of mine, Hugh Barrett, had accompanied Flaherty when he was making this classic. The script written, the agreements settled as to how we would resolve things generally, it took the super-human tact and imagination of a young producer named Rex Pyke to get our film financially and practically into motion. Then suddenly, after two years of negotiation—we started.

For myself it has meant starting off in hundreds of directions, returning, on the whole triumphantly, with the necessary spoils. Permissions to use old schools, fields, churches and chapels. Advice or artefacts from everybody within a thirty-mile radius and, most important of all, people. We auditioned scores of East Anglians for the little group of main roles and then literally went out into the highways and byways to collect country children, men and women for the large scenes. Many of the results deriving from this spontaneous casting have been a revelation to us all. I ‘shall never forget seeing the first rushes of the 1900 village school scene and the forty or so local children miraculously slipping back in time (under the influence of hob-nailed boots, slate-rags, pinafores and thunderous iron desks) until they had become, by some mysterious chemistry better known to themselves than our costume department, the distant children in the sepia photographs which I had brought from our splendid Rural Industries Museum at Stowmarket.

The school building itself was fascinating. It lies just across the meadows from my house and was built in 1858, but has not been used for over thirty years. It was the little building which Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, used to visit when he felt like instructing the children. Several of the old people in my book were educated there and after we had re-furnished it with all the things discovered in the East Suffolk Education Department’s store at Ipswich, swept the chimney—full of jackdaws’ nests—lit the fire in the massive Victorian grate and chalked 'Tuesday 3rd January 1900’ on the blackboard, I thought of those neighbours of mine who had actually sat in this tall room and heard about the Boer War.

It was foolhardy, we realised later, to have begun filming Akenfield with a particularly elaborate and subtle scene involving seventy people, if one included such kind assistants as the Vicar’s wife and the headmistress of the nearby primary school, but when we saw the results on a vast screen in a little cinema in Wardour Street, we were delighted that we took so bold a plunge. I think it was John Constable who said that 'a big canvas will tell you what you cannot do’ and this first weekend of shooting, appropriately enough in Debach school, was a real education for everybody working on Akenfield. It did indeed tell us what we could not do in the circumstances of this unusual film, and this was never to go beyond the reality of what existed before our very eyes. The reality was the fun, the sadness, the poetry and the truth. And thus all the drama that we required.

The fun certainly came over in a big way—and accompanied by big-band music—when we held a 1943 village dance. Mr Arbon, who had blacked-out the hall for Hitler’s war, blacked it out all over again for us. People of all ages, the Young Farmers’ Club, farm workers and their families, teachers, every kind of person, danced to Glen Miller and the Inkspots, while the bombers from the nearby aerodrome (now the site of a vast mushroom factory) boomed overhead. Searchlights, sandbags, uniforms of the Suffolk Regiment, free beer from the Ipswich brewers whose wartime ads were mixed up with posters which said, 'Be like Dad, Keep Mum’, and some drastic haircuts created the kind of nostalgia you could cut with a knife.

But the real test of filming Akenfield has been re-creating the old horse economy of Suffolk for the early scenes, finding those small fields of heavy clay, with their dense hedges, discovering workable forges which have not progressed from leather bellows to acetylene welding and, above all, searching out young farm workers who are able to do the old traditional crafts. We soon found out that the best way to do anything of this nature was not by appeals in the local press or on local television, although each of these mediums have given us the most generous help, but by good old bush telegraph. Not the least disturbance to my normally extremely quiet existence is the unknown voice on the telephone, full of Suffolk diffidence, saying, 'I hear you’re looking for a man who can use a reaper…’ Or giving me invaluable advice on costume, weather, hymns, pigs, stone-picking, battery chickens or just life itself as we aim to show it.

Perhaps our best scene, and certainly the one which most excites us, is the great harvest scene of about 1911, with the magnificent Suffolk waggons, the biggest in England, in the field and with heroic punches to draw them. We intend to cut two fields according to the old manner and have even arranged for them to be delightfully, if inefficiently, starred with poppies and scabious. We are praying for traditional harvest sun and moonshine so that we can capture something of those toiling idylls reflected in the Suffolk Photographic Survey, a wonderful collection of old pictures showing every facet of rural life in the county since the 1870s. The survey is the basis of our authority in such matters and I find it deeply moving to see these glimpses of Suffolk long ago brought into the present, as it were–principally by local faces. 'Hands last’, said the blacksmith in my book. So do faces, of course. The youngster climbing out of his car, a bit awkwardly, for the old clothes are massive compared with jersey and jeans, takes the plough-reins and plunges off to the horizon behind delicately stepping shires, and, certainly for all the intents and purposes of our film, is his grandfather.

We have to shoot across the seasons, of course, so the making of the film is abnormally protracted. It is an enormous film, maybe two hours long and full of time and music, as well as work. Also love and death. Peter Hall calls it his home movie, thinking of his special involvement and of the weekend shooting schedules. In between filming, we all rush back to our 'normal’ tasks, Peter to the National Theatre, the camera crew to various studios, the producer to cutting Pinter’s The Home-coming, the designer, the make-up girls, wardrobe mistresses, and so on to a variety of professional quarters and myself to writing a book called The Art of the English Diary which makes a change. And our cast hurries back to keep half a dozen surrounding villages running.

If we succeed, we shall have challenged a lot of myths connected with the orthodox film industry, particularly those dealing with money. Our company, which we have registered as 'Angle Films’, is really a co-operative from which nobody takes his usual professional fee until the film itself makes a profit. If its soul, or whatever, finally emerges into the un-common light of an East Anglian day, it will be due to the marvellous help of the country people themselves, who have been swift to recognise the special nature of the enterprise, and due a bit also to Peter Hall and myself coming from many generations of 'Suffolk’.

Home movie: The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe. Reproduced here with the kind permission of both Ronald and The Countryman. First published in The Countryman, summer 1973.

Orford Ness

Orford Ness is a cuspate foreland shingle spit on the Suffolk coast in Great Britain, linked to the mainland at Aldeburgh and stretching along the coast to Orford and down to North Weir Point, opposite Shingle Street.

Between August 1913 and the summer of 1916 the southern half of the King's Marsh was drained and levelled to form airfields to the left and right of the road. The site was ready to receive its first aircraft in 1915. This was perhaps the most significant turning point in the history of the Ness, with the arrival of part of the Central Flying School's Experimental Flying Section from Upavon in Wiltshire. This was the start of 70 years of intense military experimentation, which as well as leaving a variety of physical traces, has given the place what has been described as 'the mystique of secrecy'. The longevity as a place of military experimentation is significant. The arrival of the military curtailed the traditional uses of the Ness by the local population, although the station soon became an important source of employment for them. Most of the experimental work related to aerial warfare. Parachutes, bombs, machine guns and aircraft. Significant advances were made in both military hardware and experimental techniques and equipment. Amongst the pioneering work of the First World War were early experiments on the parachute, on aerial photography and on bomb and machine gun sights as well as evaluation of aircraft and the development of camouflage. After the War Orford Ness was put on a 'care and maintenance' order until 1924 when it was reopened as a satellite of the Aeroplane and Armaments Experimental Establishment at nearby Martlesham.

When the site was reopened in 1924 a 'new' experimental bombing range replaced the First World War range. The range operated right up until the development of nuclear weapons, with some of the last work being the development of advanced high-speed, low-altitude bombing techniques for Britain's last independent air-dropped nuclear weapons, the WE177 series. The current Bomb Ballistics building was built in 1933 to house 'state of the art' equipment used to record the flight of bombs. This information was used to improve their aerodynamics and provide data for the production of the tables used to refine bomb aiming. The equipment was steadily improved over the years, most notably from the 1950s for the development of the atomic bomb. The technical capabilities of the range were proved by the fact it was still used during the Second World War, despite its proximity to the continent. The Bomb Ballistics building was restored in 1996, and the roof now provides a platform from which to view the site, in particular the vegetated shingle features that make the Ness such an important site. Inside there is a display on the uses of this building and the surrounding area.

This enigmatic building, looking much like a sail-less black windmill, was constructed by local builders WC Reade of Aldeburgh in 1928 for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, to house an experimental 'rotating loop' navigation beacon. Part funded by Trinity House and reported to be a marine navigation beacon, the Air Ministry also funded work on the development of an aircraft location system based on this early innovation, and the Orford Ness equipment was probably an early homing beacon for aircraft that formed part of this work. Renovated in 1995, the beacon now provides an elevated viewing area and displays for the visiting public.

Perhaps the most significant experiments on Orford Ness took place between 1935 and 1937, after Robert Watson-Watt and his team arrived on 13 May 1935 to found the 'Ionospheric Research Station'.This was in fact a cover for the research and development of the aerial defence system, which was later to become known as radar. Still standing and recently restored, one of the few surviving First World War accommodation blocks on the site (later employed as the NAAFI) was used by those radar pioneers. The First World War 'Institute' building - close by and still standing - might also have been used in these experiments. The first demonstrations of the feasibility of radar as a practical air defence system were made here before the team moved a little further down the coast to a larger site at Bawdsey Manor in 1936. There, a full range of applications was developed leading to the creation of the first of the 'Chain Home' stations. It is not an exaggeration to say that but for the work done by this team at Orford Ness and Bawdsey Manor, the outcome of the Battle of Britain and the subsequent history of Europe would have been very different.

Between 1938 and 1959 a majority of the firing trials were concentrated in the northern airfield, part of which is now reedbed. The firing trials were mainly concerned with determining the vulnerability of aircraft and aircraft components to attack by various projectiles. Whole aircraft or individual parts such as fuel tanks, oxygen tanks or running engines were subjected to carefully controlled and recorded simulations of attack. A principal area of work involved improving the lethality of Allied ammunition and improving the protection of Allied aircraft against German ammunition. A wide range of aircraft including four-engine bombers would be lined up here undergoing trials. To determine vulnerability the aircraft were shot at with .303 rifles from all angles, a single shot at a time, with each bullet hole marked and recorded after every shot. After the war work continued on machine gun ammunition, rockets and other projectiles, on the vulnerability of aircraft to attack and the development of techniques to record projectiles in flight and duplicate various effects experimentally.

Connected with the 'lethality and vulnerability' firing trials a rather uninteresting looking building was home to a number of extraordinary experiments. During the 1940s the Plate Store was part of a plate range. The plates in question were sheets of experimental armour plate or paper targets. Initially built to house the plate armour, the end wall was later removed and various types of projectile were fired from smooth bore field guns into plates mounted inside the building to test their effectiveness. Tests on the fragmentation of projectiles employed old London telephone directories to determine how far the fragments would penetrate. The method of firing projectiles from smooth bore cannon was later employed in the Model Bombing Range (sited near the NAAFi building) to test models of bombs and rockets. The Plate Store was last used by the AWRE as a technical base for experiments on the interaction of radio waves with the ionosphere. The bases of the radio masts can still be seen around the brackish lagoons just over the Chinese Wall in the King's Marsh.

After the Second World War, work continued on the aerodynamics of bombs, machine gun ammunition, rockets and other projectiles. It also continued on the vulnerability of aircraft to attack and the development of techniques to record projectiles in flight and duplicate various effects experimentally. During the 1950s the King's Marsh was used as an experimental range for recording the flight paths of air-launched rockets. Fired from above the airfields the rockets were recorded by a series of cameras triggered by infrared sensitive cells, which could detect the rocket as it passed over. In the peaceful atmosphere of today it is difficult to imagine the noise generated by these trials as the Gloster Meteor jets passed over at full speed and at a height of only 50 feet (15 metres).

In 1968 work started on the top secret Anglo-American System 441A 'over-the-horizon' (OTH) backscatter radar project, finally code-named Cobra Mist. The Anglo-American project, whose main contractor was the Radio Corporation of America, was set up to carry out several 'missions', including detection and tracking of aircraft, detection of missile and satellite vehicle launchings, fulfilling intelligence requirements and providing a research and development test-bed. A multi-million pound project, it was plagued by a severe 'noise' problem of an undetermined origin which resulted in a major reduction in detection capability. An investigation into this problem by a joint US/UK Scientific Assessment Committee (SAC) led to a report and recommendations in early 1973 from which came a joint US/UK decision to terminate operations at Orford Ness, based on economic and 'other considerations'. An integral part of the project, beyond the building stood 18 'strings' of antennae in the shape of a large open fan, until they were removed in the mid 1970s. This fan was accompanied by a large aluminium 'ground net' covering some 80 acres of Lantern Marsh to the north of the site. Cobra Mist is also well known for its alleged associations with UFOs. The large grey steel building currently houses radio transmitters that until recently broadcast the BBC World Service.

It is a place of strange contrasts. For the National Trust, its 'elemental nature' contrasts with the 'inherent dangers' of this place, a 'hostile and potentially dangerous site'. Military structures - the Bomb Ballistics Building, the Black Beacon, the 'pagodas' used for explosive design - have been converted into viewing spots. This is not a celebratory site, however; there is ambivalence and doubt here, with regard to what is being physically and ideologically conserved.

— Rachel Woodward — National Trust

Images — A Film by Robert Altman

When a wealthy housewife and children's author begins to have disturbing visions, her husband takes her to the countryside for a vacation. There, her delusions worsen, with tragic consequences.

Wealthy children's author Cathryn (Susannah York) receives a series of disturbing phone calls in her home in London one dreary night; the female voice on the other end, sometimes cutting in on other phone conversations, suggests mockingly that her husband Hugh (René Auberjonois) is having an affair. Hugh comes home, finding Cathryn in distress. As Hugh attempts to comfort her, Cathryn witnesses a different man who is behaving as if he were her husband. She screams in horror and backs away, only to see her vision of the figure revert to her husband.

Hugh attributes her outburst to stress and her pregnancy. He decides to take her on a vacation to an isolated cottage in the Irish countryside, where Cathryn can work on her book and take photographs for its illustrations. Immediately upon her arrival, however, Cathryn hears voices saying her name and sees strange apparitions: While preparing lunch one day, she sees her husband Hugh pass through the kitchen, then transform into her dead lover, Rene (Marcel Bozzuffi). Rene continues to appear to her around the house, and even speaks with her.

Cathryn's paranoia and visions become increasingly pervasive, and are exacerbated when a local neighbor and ex-lover, Marcel (Hugh Millais), brings his adolescent daughter, Susannah (Cathryn Harrison), to visit. Cathryn becomes unable to distinguish Hugh from Rene or Marcel, as the men shift before her eyes. One day, Rene taunts Cathryn, asking her to kill him if she wants rid of him, and hands her a shotgun. She shoots him through the abdomen; Susannah, startled by the gunshot, runs into the house, and finds Cathryn standing in the den, having shot Hugh's camera to pieces. Cathryn claims the gun accidentally fired when she was moving it.

Seeking solace, Cathryn goes to a nearby waterfall, where she often sees her doppelgänger staring back at her. After one such occurrence, she returns to the house, where Hugh tells her he has to leave for business. She drives him to the train station and returns to the house, where she finds Marcel waiting inside. He begins to undress to have sex with her, but she stabs him through the chest with a kitchen knife. The next morning, she encounters a local elderly man walking his dog, and invites him to come inside for coffee, in spite of the fact that Marcel's corpse apparently lies in the living room (which suggests that she regards the "murder" as a hallucination, like her shooting of Rene); the old man declines the invitation. Later in the evening, Susannah stops by the house, and remarks that her father was not at home when she awoke that morning. Cathryn is alarmed by this, as it could mean that she really did kill Marcel. She is relieved to hear that Marcel did return drunk after midnight, and invites Susannah in for a cup of tea after reasoning that Marcel cannot be dead on her living room floor. Susannah asks Cathryn if she looked like her when she was young before ominously saying, "I'm going to be exactly like you."

After having tea, Cathryn drives Susannah back home. Marcel comes out of the house and attempts to talk to Cathryn, but she drives away. While on a stretch of road through a desolate field, Cathryn witnesses her doppelgänger again, attempting to wave her down. Back at the house, she finds both Rene and Marcel's corpses have reappeared in the living room. Cathryn leaves again, and encounters her doppelgänger at a bend in the road; this time she stops. The doppelgänger begs Cathryn to let her into the car, and the two begin to speak in unison. She then hits the doppelgänger with the car, throwing her off a cliff and into a waterfall below. Cathryn then drives back to her home in London. At her home, she goes to take a shower. While in the bathroom, the door opens, and the doppelgänger walks inside. Cathryn screams in terror, "I killed you," to which the doppelgänger responds, "Not me." The final shot shows Hugh's corpse lying at the bottom of the falls.

Susannah York - Cathryn, Rene Auberjonois - Hugh, Marcel Bozzuffi - Rene, Hugh Millais - Marcel, Cathryn Harrison - Susannah, John Morley - Old Man, Barbara Baxley - Voice on telephone (uncredited).

Produced by Tommy Thompson and Al Locatelli (uncredited), Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, Film Editing by Graeme Clifford, Production Design by Leon Ericksen.

Makeup Department: Toni Delaney … makeup artist, Barry Richardson … hair stylist, Production Management: Sheila Collins … production manager, Second Unit Director or Assistant Director: Seamus Byrne … assistant director, Sound Department: Rodney Holland … sound editor, Noel Quinn … boom operator, Liam Saurin … sound recordist, Doug E. Turner … dubbing mixer (as Doug Turner), Stomu Yamashta … sounds (as Stomu Yamash'ta), Special Effects by Jerry F. Johnson … special effects (as Jerry Johnson), Gerry Johnston … special effects (uncredited), Camera and Electrical Department: Earl L. Clark … assistant camera (as Earl Clark), Jack Conroy…gaffer, Paddy Keogh … grip, Nico Vermuelen … assistant camera, Costume and Wardrobe Department: Jack Gallagher … wardrobe, Editorial Department: Robin Buick … assistant editor, Michael Kelliher … assistant editor, David Spiers … assistant editor, Music Department: Stomu Yamashta … musician: sound sculptures, John Williams … orchestrator (uncredited), Transportation Department: Arthur Dunne … transportation captain, Other Crew: Joan Bennett … continuity, John Collingwood … production accountant, Jean D'Oncieu … assistant to producer.

The Lost Town of Dunwich

There's a queer story going about, when the door's shut and the curtain's drawn, that is, as to a place right out in the country over the other side of Midlingham; on the opposite side to Dunwich. They've built one of the new factories out there, a great red brick town of sheds they tell me it is, with a tremendous chimney. It's not been finished more than a month or six weeks. They plumped it down right in the middle of the fields, by the line, and they're building huts for the workers as fast as they can but up to the present the men are billeted all about, up and down the line … Some say they've seen the gas. I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw it one night like a black cloud with sparks of fire in it floating over the tops of the trees by Dunwich Common.

— The Terror by Arthur Machen

Dunwich is a village and civil parish in Suffolk, England. It is located in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB around 92 miles north-east of London, 9 miles south of Southwold and 7 miles north of Leiston, on the North Sea coast.

In the Anglo-Saxon period, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles but the harbour and most of the town have since disappeared due to coastal erosion. At its height it was an international port similar in size to 14th century London. Its decline began in 1286 when a storm surge hit the East Anglian coast followed by a great storm in 1287 and another great storm also in 1287, and it was eventually reduced in size to the village it is today. Dunwich is possibly connected with the lost Anglo-Saxon placename Dommoc.

A gravestone dedicated to Jacob Forster is the last remaining memorial in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Dunwich. The church was decommissioned in 1758 due to encroaching coastal erosion. Most of the site went over the cliff; the last remaining buttress from the church was saved in 1920 and was moved to St James Church. The gravestone reads "In Memory of Jacob Forster who departed this life March 12th 1796 aged 38 years"

The Dark Heart of Dunwich is piece of Suffolk folklore, the origins of which appear to lie in the 12th century. The legend tells of how Eva, a Dunwich maiden due to be married to the son of a local landowner, fell instead for a good-looking local cad, who had his way with her and then deserted her, running off to sea. After waiting in vain for her lost love to return, she cut out her heart and hurled it into the sea. However, according to the legend, she was unable to die, and still haunts the area, particularly around the (constantly shifting) beach. The heart itself, believed to be similar in appearance to a wooden heart, is believed to wash up occasionally, and bring great misfortune onto anyone who picks it up and keeps it.

"Faye's book is, without doubt, an important contribution to the theory of causality. It is meant not merely to reconstruct or to react to existing scientific knowledge but “to outline the conceptual foundations of new scientific knowledge". In that sense, it stands in the tradition of classical essays concerning natural philosophy and metaphysics. Faye's aim is nothing less than to give us a comprehensive characterisation of the conceptual and logical features of the direction of causation (including a coherent notion of backward causation) and, what is more, to give us an understanding of how causation is related to energy and time. The monograph is original to a very large extent; sometimes provocative (for more traditional accounts). It contains eight chapters, an introduction, conclusion, and a helpful index. In the following, we briefly mention the content of Faye's book and point out those of his claims which seem to demand further clarification. Chapter I deals with 'The puzzles about backward causation'. However, Faye's theory of backward causation is not a really shocking one - no fortune-tellers, no altering the past, nor shooting someone's own grandfather. Even if there were instances of causal relationship directed against the temporal order of events of the system under consideration, the kind of involved particles is limited to hypothetical quantum-mechanical objects ("advanced particles") only. Moreover, those objects would not be able to interact (at least not directly) with the "normal particles" of the world. This topic is considered in more detail in the last two Chapters VII (The advanced particles'), VIII (‘The theories of tachyons and their interpretations') and in the Conclusion. Naturally, telling stories about backward causation is not the ultimate goal of Faye's considerations. Chapter I revisits a representative sample of arguments against backward causation to see whether it is ruled out by any of the aprioristic reasons stated so far. Faye's conclusion is straightforward: backward causation is conceptually possible”

Jan Faye, The Reality of the Future - An Essay on Time, Causation and Backward Causation. Odense University Studies in Philosophy vol. 7. © 1989 by Jan Faye and Odense University Press. Photoset and printed by AiO Tryk as ISBN 87 7492 710 8. ISSN 0107 7384.

Who is afraid of the Causal-General Approach?

Philosophers have struggled with understanding the direction of time for centuries. No common notion is available even today. There are those who think of time's arrow in terms of objective becoming. They hold that since fundamental laws of nature are time-invariant, allowing processes to be symmetric in time, it must be some kind of objective becoming that tailors these processes in one direction. On this perspective the orientation of causal processes are parasitic on objective becoming. Becoming is ontic prior to causation. This view fares well with substantivalism but not with relationalism, since, ex hypothesis, becoming are not reducible to any relation between events. Nonetheless, some philosophers urge to bring in objective becoming in a relativistic framework partly because they don't see the possibility of physics to describe the necessary asymmetry as an intrinsic feature of the causal processes.

The major part of philosophers and physicists agree that causal processes do not exhibit an intrinsic arrow in virtue of certain nomological features, i.e. they believe that the asymmetry is not internal to the processes themselves. But they also reject the idea that the observed causal asymmetry is due to an objective becoming as vacuous or incoherent. Objective becoming is incompatible with relationalism if it cannot be reduced to features of the causal processes or features of the laws of physics, and relationalism is traditionally regarded as the ontological foundation of relativity theories - although today this is more controversial. These philosophers and physicists are still looking to physics to find a proper way of describing the causal asymmetry in spite of the fact that they deny that there exist intrinsically asymmetrical causal relations. The upshot is that they find various physical arrows of time but all of them, or nearly all of them, are due to an asymmetric distribution of boundary conditions. They argue that any asymmetrical causal relation consists in either a contingent asymmetry in the distribution of boundary conditions or in an anthropocentric projection. The basic laws of physics are symmetric in time and provide no help in marking out the direction of physical processes.

Apparently, we are left with two alternative approaches to a causal asymmetry: becoming or boundary conditions. One has little if no place in physics (as Dorato points out), whereas the other yields mostly an extrinsic asymmetry. Such an asymmetry may, however, not even in fact coincide with time's arrow. In my opinion, however, there is a third alternative: The basis of the arrow of causation rests on an intrinsic, non-relational physical property of a process that makes an instance of it a temporally asymmetric cause of an effect.

Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalise some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin’s Lane, “of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with ‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood”. That wild word, “Moor Eeffoc, "is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.

Charles Dickens: A Critical Study by G. K. Chesterton. New York, Dodd, Mead & Company (1906).

"As a literary critic, Chesterton was without parallel. His biography of Charles Dickens is credited with sparking the Dickens revival in London in the early 20th century. His biography of St. Thomas Aquinas was called the best book on St. Thomas ever written, by no less than Etienne Gilson, the 20th century's greatest Thomistic scholar. His books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man are considered the 20th century's finest works of Christian and Catholic apologetics. And audiences still delight in the adventures of Chesterton's priest sleuth, Father Brown, as well as such timeless novels as The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and others”

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realise that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot. Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you. The “fantastic” elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give.

Tree and Leaf by J. R. R. Tolkien, George Allen and Unwin (1975).

Image © The British Film Institute, used with kind permission.

“By the act of reflection something is altered in the way in which the fact was originally presented in sensation, perception, or conception” — Hegel, 1830, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties … Phenomenology (archaeology), based upon understanding cultural landscapes from a sensory perspective … Phenomenology (particle physics), a branch of particle physics that deals with the application of theory to high-energy experiments … Phenomenology (philosophy), a philosophical method and school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) … Existential phenomenology, in the work of Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and his followers … Phenomenology of Perception, the magnum opus of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty …Phenomenology of religion, concerning the experiential aspect of religion in terms consistent with the orientation of the worshippers … The Phenomenology of Spirit, a book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel … Phenomenology (psychology), used in psychology to refer to subjective experiences or their study … Phenomenology (science), used in science to describe a body of knowledge that relates empirical observations of phenomena to each other.

Phenomenology; A term used in philosophy to denote enquiry into one’s conscious and particularly intellectual processes, any preconceptions about external causes and consequences being excluded. It is a method of investigation into the mind that is associated with the name of Edmund Husserl, as it was he who did most to develop it, although when Husserl’s system appeared on the philosophical scene, the word already had a long history and had undergone a conspicuous semantic evolution.

The first use of it goes back to Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-77), a disciple of Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Lambert published in 1764 a treatise on epistemology dealing with the problem of truth and illusion, under the rather pedantic title of Neues Organon oder Gedanken über die Erforschung des Wahren und der Unterscheidung von Irrtum und Schein (New Organon, or Thoughts on the Search for Truth and the Distinction between Error and Appearance), in the fourth part of which he outlines a theory of illusion that he calls ‘phenomenology or theory of appearance’. Although he belongs to a period in the history of philosophy in which the question of the intuition of essences had not yet been raised, his implicit definition of phenomenology, taken literally, does not sound odd to the post-Husserlian reader, except that to him, Lambert, an appearance (or phenomenon) is necessarily an illusion. More important, Lambert was acquainted with Kant, and Kant in 1770 was writing to him about the need for a 'general phenomenology’ which he conceived as a preparatory step to the metaphysical analysis of natural science. According to Spiegelberg (1960), what Kant called phenomenology was in fact synonymous with his idea of the critique of pure reason, though nothing allows us to suppose that he specifically used the term forged by Lambert to qualify phenomena as antithetic to noumena or things in themselves. It is, however, with Hegel’s Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Mind), published in 1807, that the term is used explicitly for the first time to label a philosophical work of fundamental importance.

A significant step in its evolution from Lambert to Hegel may be found in J. G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science), in which its role is to establish the origin of phenomena as they exist for consciousness; and in Hegel’s elaborate system, its basic task is primarily historical since it aims at discovering the successive steps of realisation of self-consciousness from elementary individual sensations up to the stage of absolute knowledge through dialectic processes.

The few authors worth mentioning who dealt with phenomenological problems between Hegel and Husserl are William Hamilton (1788-1856), who in fact equates phenomenology with psychology as opposed to logic, Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), whose studies on religious, ethical, and aesthetic consciousness were greatly inspired by Hegel’s phenomenology, and, to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce, though his work on the classification of phenomena belongs more to metaphysics than to an actual phenomenology of subjective experience.

Except in the case of Hegel, phenomenology was not a major field of reflection until Husserl’s monumental work. Since Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is discussed in some detail in the entry under his name, it will suffice here to underline its distinctive features. In contrast with pre-existing philosophies, it is no mere, closed, abstract construct that theoretically allows the philosopher to pronounce on the conditions of principles of experience; it is rather an endless attempt to stick to the reality of experienced phenomena in order to exhibit their universal character. In order to succeed in the endeavour, Husserl has to discard the classic dualistic view, according to which the knowing subject reaches the world only through representation — a position typical of rationalistic and idealistic systems. Hence he refers, after Brentano, to the intentional character of consciousness, and condemns psychologism (the theory that psychology is the foundation of philosophy) in view of the contradiction it brings about: that the supposedly universal laws of logic and mathematics would be dependent on the concrete functioning of psychological mechanisms. The Husserlian standpoint is thus a radical one, since it aims at 'going back to the things themselves’ by claiming that there is no reason to suppose that phenomenon and being are not identical. In other words, the noema (object content) and the noesis (knowing act) are directly related by the intentionality of consciousness, so that every phenomenon is intuitively present to the subject.

However, phenomena, as they are grasped by the subject, are always given under a particular profile. No object whatsoever is given in its totality as a simultaneous exhaustible whole, but every profile conveys its essence under the form of meaning for consciousness. In order to reach the essence of any object, one is bound to proceed to unceasing variations around the object as thematic reality, i.e. to discover the essence through the multiplicity of possible profiles. This procedure applies to all phenomena, ranging from current perceptual experience to the highly intricate constructs characterising the various fields of knowledge, such as physics and psychology.

Every phenomenon belongs to a regional ontology by virtue of its essence, as revealed by the so-called eidetic intuition, the essence (eidos) being the sum of all possible profiles. In the course of this process, consciousness operates as a constitutive moment, i.e. its activity in grasping the essence of phenomena is, perforce, part of the process of their emergence. Thus Husserl overcomes the classic dualism of subject and object. Reaching the universal essence of an object through eidetic intuition, i.e. discovering the basic structure implied by its very existence, is a process which Husserl calls eidetic reduction. This being granted, the next step consists in referring phenomena to subjectivity without falling back into psychologism, since the empirical subject, as referred to psychology’s own regional ontology (or Descartes’ res cogitans), belongs to a realm of contingent being, which cannot furnish by itself the necessary foundation for the organisation of the absolute principles governing universal essences. Husserl is therefore bound to exclude belief in the natural world as the ultimate reference of all our intentional acts. This process is termed phenomenological reduction. It presupposes, in Husserl’s terms, a provisional 'bracketing’ (Einklammerung) of the natural and a description or explication of our intentional acts as referred to pure noematic structures.

The final accomplishment of this process is the transcendental reduction, by which the fundamental conditions of every possible meaningful intentional relation must be elucidated. This is the core of Husserl’s theory of transcendental subjectivity or transcendental ego. Thus Husserl’s phenomenology reconsidered the philosophical problem of consciousness in a radical fashion and contributed thereby to the placing of psychology — and the human sciences in general — within a new epistemological framework. Criticism of the one-sidedness of both empiricist and idealistic standpoints could be developed so that the shortcomings of dualistic views, with all their derivatives such as mechanicism, parallelism, and phenomenalism, became more apparent.

As a fundamental theory of phenomena ranging from perception to creative thinking, it has provided a firm starting point for the integration of concepts of the subject at different levels: hence phenomenologically inspired hypotheses such as those that guided F. J. J. Buytendijk and V. von Weiszäcker in anthropological physiology. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the experienced body (1942) and perception (1945) were phenomenological works that contributed to the transforming of the classical standpoints in psychology.

— Georges Thinès, 1987, Oxford Companion to the Mind.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter–rambling the streets of London.

 The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, “Take it!” she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul–as travellers do. All this–Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul–rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. “The man’s a devil!” said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

 But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

 How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light–windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars–lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which—-She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only–the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?”

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for “this lady” and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was hot afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it–all joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf’s dance.

In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even greater fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, china umbrella handles, and highly-coloured pictures of martyred saints. There they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin jacket must find life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or the man who covers buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.  Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone’s throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars’ heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one’s will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. Or let us indulge ourselves at the antique jewellers, among the trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out onto a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair. There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-making is going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind thick green curtains. Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie sun-bathed, the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and-So with the curls and the emeralds the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly, as we stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess Mary’s garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don’t live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind’s inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller’s wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman’s library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking, how “I said to her quite straight last night … if you don’t think I’m worth a penny stamp, I said …” But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.

But we have come to the Strand now, and as we hesitate on the curb, a little rod about the length of one’s finger begins to lay its bar across the velocity and abundance of life. “Really I must–really I must”–that is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. But just as we are turning to obey the command, another self disputes the right of the tyrant to insist. The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames–wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person–and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then–calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea. It brings down with it a tug and two barges, whose load of straw is tightly bound down beneath tarpaulin covers. There is, too, close by us, a couple leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on claims without question the indulgence of the human race. The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life. He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

It is always an adventure to enter a new room for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion. Here, without a doubt, in the stationer’s shop people had been quarrelling. Their anger shot through the air. They both stopped; the old woman–they were husband and wife evidently–retired to a back room; the old man whose rounded forehead and globular eyes would have looked well on the frontispiece of some Elizabethan folio, stayed to serve us. “A pencil, a pencil,” he repeated, “certainly, certainly.” He spoke with the distraction yet effusiveness of one whose emotions have been roused and checked in full flood. He began opening box after box and shutting them again. He said that it was very difficult to find things when they kept so many different articles. He launched into a story about some legal gentleman who had got into deep waters owing to the conduct of his wife. He had known him for years; he had been connected with the Temple for half a century, he said, as if he wished his wife in the back room to overhear him. He upset a box of rubber bands. At last, exasperated by his incompetence, he pushed the swing door open and called out roughly: “Where d'you keep the pencils?” as if his wife had hidden them. The old lady came in. Looking at nobody, she put her hand with a fine air of righteous severity upon the right box. There were pencils. How then could he do without her? Was she not indispensable to him? In order to keep them there, standing side by side in forced neutrality, one had to be particular in one’s choice of pencils; this was too soft, that too hard. They stood silently looking on. The longer they stood there, the calmer they grew; their heat was going down, their anger disappearing. Now, without a word said on either side, the quarrel was made up. The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson’s title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here–let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence–is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

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“The Owl Service — Granada’s first major all location, fully-scripted drama serial — was adapted in eight episodes by Cheshire author Alan Garner from his award-winning book. The story is based on a strange old Welsh legend which gradually unfolds while three teenagers — Alison, Roger and Gwyn — are on holiday in Wales’ — Granada TV 1978 press release

"​The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the film or page. Right from the start things happened that haven’t happened with any other book I’ve written​. ​​It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went​ ​right​ ​through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw​ ​to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband’s murder, was turned into an owl​” ​—​ ​Alan Garner​, Filming The Owl Service.

“They took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they called forth the very fairest and best endowed maiden that mortal ever saw" — The Mabinogion

"Many accomplished actors live the parts they are playing, but it’s no joke when a legend takes such a grip on them that it affects their private lives even after filming is over. This is precisely what happened to blonde actress Gillian Hills (she was one of the little girls who stripped off in Blow Up), Francis Wallis and Michael Holden. They play the three teenagers, step-brother and sister Roger and Alison and Welsh boy Gwyn in Granada’s current mystery serial, The Owl Service. The story, which centres round an old Welsh legend, is set in a remote mid-Wales valley near the town of Dinas Mawddwy, where much of the filming was done. The trio discover an old dinner service in an attic and Alison finds that if she traces its unusual pattern and fits it together, the figure of an owl appears. In fact, owls are the key to the whole intriguing mystery (now in its third week) in which the three become involved in the ancient legend of the beautiful Blodeuwedd. Created out of flowers as a wife for the hero Lleu, she was turned into an owl after being unfaithful to him with her lover Gronw. The cruelties and passions generated by these legendary figures still disturb the valley, and begin to take possession of Gwyn, Alison and Roger. Slightly sceptical of the legend, I invited the trio to a reunion down in the depths of the Essex country-side. I took with me one of the original plates, with startling results. It conjured instant memories which hurtled us all mentally into mid-Wales. Brought up in a converted shepherd’s cottage in Snowdonia, 19-year-old Michael Holden described how the legend took control of them during filming” — Ann Beveridge​, ​The Observer on Sunday magazine, January 1970​

“It was an incredible experience for all of us. It was as if we personally were really living the thing. The legend, the spirit of the valley was so strong that we became obsessed by it. I felt very close to the whole thing. The area was so much like where I grew up in Bethesda—and it was nice to go back to being outnumbered by sheep” — Michael Holden​, The Observer on Sunday magazine, January 1970​

“The Owl Service is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the film or page. Right from the start things happened that haven’t happened with any other book I’ve written. It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd, who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebyr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went right through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called the Stone of Gronw to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband’s murder, was turned into an owl. The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day Griselda’s mother showed me an old dinner service that she had. She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edges of the plates could be seen as the body, wings and head of an owl. Griselda traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, and there it was-a paper owl" — Alan Garner, Filming The Owl Service, an Armada special, 1970​

"Rehearsals began at Poulton, and I met the actors for the first time. It was a nasty experience. "Well,” said Peter, “do they look right?” I wanted to run. They looked too right. It was like a waking dream. Here were the people I’d thought about, who’d lived in my head for so long ; but now they were real. I couldn’t accept that they were only actors. And this feeling got worse when they began to read their parts, and speak the words I’d given them. We took the cast to Wales for a couple of days right at the start, so that they coil hi get the feel of the original setting. Now my waking dream grew worse. The characters were where I’d imagined them, and it was as if I was looking at live ghosts" — Alan Garner, Filming The Owl Service, an Armada special, 1970​

Bridget Appleby (Graphic Artist) Richard Branczik (Camera Assistant) Harry Brookes (Sound Recordist) Peter Caldwell (Designer) Jack Coggins (Generator Operator) Stewart Darby (Stills Photographer) Sue Fox (Press & Publicity) Alan Garner (Scriptwriter) Ray Goode (Cameraman) James Green (Chargehand Electrician) Frank Griffiths (Music Recordist) Don Kelly (Film Editor) Alan Kennedy (Props Manager) Neil Kingsbury (Sound Assistant) John Martin (Electrician) Ian McAnulty (Stage Hand) John Murphy (Casting Director) Marjorie Norrey (Wardrobe) John Oakins (Unit Manager) Peter Plummer (Producer & Director) Dick Pope (Camera Assistant) Michael Popley (Camera Assistant) Jon Prince (Asst. Film Editor) Harry Rabbie (Camera Assistant) Elvira Riddell (Make-up) Phil Smith (Sound Recordist) Michael Thomson (Camera Assistant) Peter Walker (Dubbing Mixer) Alan Waterfall (Set Dresser) Louise Williams (Production Assistant) David Wood (Cameraman).​

Granada Television for ITV​. ​December 21, 1969​ ​— ​​February 8, 1970.​ 16mm, colour. ​Filming locations: Dinas Mawddwy, Gwynedd, Wales, UK and Poulton Hall, Liverpool, Merseyside, England, UK.

“The Owl Service was much admired but because I could never bear to watch myself I have seen it only now. Father’s very proper English family frowned at having an actress in the family yet they watched the first episode to see what I was like and followed the whole series. That was a huge compliment. The Owl Service was a magnificent gift that allowed me to haul back a slice of my lost youth. It had fallen by the wayside at fourteen when I was ‘discovered’ by Roger Vadim. No more contact with kids my age meant there was a chink in my learning compass. So my memory is not of anecdotes, stories. I was totally engrossed with the feel of Alison. In effect, Alison allowed me to become while she too was unfolding. It also played a part in changing the course of my life. The graphics designer for The Owl Service came while we were filming and I told him how curious I was about his work: when I was a recording artist in Paris I’d go round to see my friends at the music magazine Salut Les Copains - I adored the way the magazine was being put together. The designer invited me to visit the TV centre where they produced the visuals, soon I began at St Martins, but work was always taking me away, then Sir John Cass, Saturdays - but I was filming a lot. Throughout my childhood I was always drawing. My grandmother was a painter but we never met. When I began acting I gave up drawing. Three years after The Owl Service I would plunge into illustrating. The Owl Service is a peculiar work. Singular. Mesmerising. It stands out as a one off … I never thought The Owl Service was for children only. It felt as if it fit a larger audience. That’s what made it special. Because it also belongs somewhere where the memory of one’s own adolescence lies. It is super-real to the extent that it becomes unreal. Wagnerian. And too, like an old film it unreels itself repeatedly, then begins again. Any criticism that the series was unsuitably adult for children is untrue. Never underestimate the child; it is pure, it observes, makes up its own mind. But then is taught to see things otherwise … I have not read Peter’s book I’ve Seen a Ghost. I was unaware of it and maybe I should not read it. My grand father, the superlative Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian, was ruled by his exceeding 'superstitiousness,’ so the family was too. Artists are sensitive to this in varying degrees. I am glad I focused on Alison. But if something unusual happened I would keep it to myself. I prefer to believe I am contemplating the cosiness of a blanket than a levitating counterpane"​ ​— Gillian Hills in conversation with Kevin Lyons, The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television​, 2008

I’ve Seen a Ghost: True Stories from Show Business by compiled by Richard Davis. Hutchinson, 1979.

"​The mood of this book darkens perceptibly with Mr Plummer’s piece. Many of you will remember the excellent TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s ’ The Owl Service’, that strange novel about spiritual possession, haunting and fascinating in its own right. As you will read, uncanny events took place of screen as well as on. It seems that when you are creating productions about the super-natural in whatever medium, you are laying yourself wide open to psychical onslaught​"​

"We shot it on location at a little village church in Cheshire and it concerned the theory that the 'dark lady’ referred to in Shakespeare’s sonnets was a local girl, Mary Fitton. Her ghost is said to haunt the area around the church which is, in any case, a strangely solemn and timeless setting of still pond, dark trees and ancient gravestones. It had rained hard the night before we arrived, but now, as we came to the village, a hot summer sun suddenly blazed out from behind the clouds and David’s camera was presented with the extraordinary sight of individual mists rising from each of the quickly heated stones of the old flat box-tombs. All the way across the big churchyard these white veils were being drawn up from every grave. As the mist closed, it revealed, lying on the newly mown grass by the south door of the church, a scythe. Presumably the rain had interrupted the mower the previous evening. Anyway, as a piece of tempus fugit symbolism it was just too tempting and we used it in the film as a requiescat for poor Mary.​ ​After a gap of many years — nine years after the making of 'The Owl Service’, in fact — I found myself once more back at that same remote village church, this time to attend a service. It was the winter of 1977-78. A grey day offering neither sun, cloud nor vision. The mechanics of the service determined that we enter the church by the north door and leave by the south. As we came out into the cold fresh air through that south door, there, on the grass, was the scythe.​ ​I correct myself. There on the grass was a scythe. Between the first and second sightings lay a gap of some fifteen years. I know very well that the object can’t have been lying there on that grass verge for that length of time. For all I know they now use a motor-mower and I can only guess at the chances that brought the thing to that spot the second time around. But you may care to know that the occasion which had brought me back to that church was the funeral of David Wood who, some years earlier, had decided to come and live in the village.​ ​All of which — if you have ever read Alan Garner’s original book of 'The Owl Service’ — or indeed any of his books — is not quite such a detour from our starting point as it might seem. Because an idea whose variations dominate Alan’s books and films is that all time runs, in a sense, in parallel, and that patterns of violently emotional climaxes can imprint themselves through from one parallel to another. This is, if you like, rather in the way that 'pre-echo’ can occur in gramophone records or that aligned areas of sound tape can occasionally suffer from a print-through so that magnetic patterns of certain particularly strong resonances may occasionally be duplicated out of context in adjoining areas of that tape spool. As a result, when we come to play the tape it runs in continuous and uninterrupted sequence but occasionally we hear displaced echoes both before and after their true situation.​ ​Is this what happened with 'The Owl Service’? And were Alan’s book and Granada’s television film themselves the inevitable echoes, and 'prints-through’, from the past event? Or, just as plausibly, were they and was the vision of the original men who 'created’ the legend pre-echoes? Were they 'prints-back’ from a shattering primary event that, on a normal consideration of time, hasn’t yet happened?”