The Knowledge of the Future : Part 11

The Unknown Guest
by Maurice Maeterlinck

(Page 14 of 20)

It speaks all the words that can prepare us for its coming, define it and identify it; but it is unable to say those which would prevent it from coming, seeing that it has come, that it is already present and perhaps past, manifest, ineffaceable, on another plane than that on which we live, the only plane which we are capable of perceiving. It finds itself, in a word, in the position of the man who, in the midst of peaceful, happy and unsuspecting folk, alone knows some bad news. He is neither able nor willing to announce it nor yet to hide it completely. He hesitates, delays, makes more or less transparent allusions, but does not either say the last word that would, so to speak, let loose the catastrophe in the hearts of the people around him, for to those who do not know of it the catastrophe is still as though it were not there.

Our subconsciousness, in that case, would act towards the future as we act towards the past, the two conditions being identical, so much so that it often confuses them, as we can see more particularly in the celebrated Marmontel case, where it evidently blunders and reports as accomplished an incident that will not take place until several months later. It is of course impossible for us, at the stage which we have reached, to understand this confusion or this coexistence of the past, the present and the future; but that is no reason for denying it; on the contrary, what man understands least is probably that which most nearly approaches the truth.

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Lastly, to complicate the question, it may be very justly objected that, though premonitions in general are useless and appear systematically to withhold the only indispensable and decisive words, there are, nevertheless, some that often seem to save those who obey them. These, it is true, are rarer than the first, but still they include a certain number that are well authenticated. It remains to be seen how far they imply a knowledge of the future.

Here, for instance, is a traveler who, arriving at night in a small unknown town and walking along the ill-lighted dock in the direction of an hotel of which he roughly knows the position, at a given moment tech an irresistible impulse to turn and go the other way. He instantly obeys, though his reason protests and "berates him for a fool" in taking a roundabout way to his destination. The next day he discovers that, if he had gone a few feet farther, he would certainly have slipped into the river; and, as he was but a feeble swimmer, he would just as certainly, being alone and unaided in the extreme darkness, have been drowned.

But is this a prevision of an event? No, for no event is to take place. There is simply an abnormal perception of the proximity of some unknown water and consequently of an imminent danger, an unexplained but fairly frequent subliminal sensitiveness. In a word, the problem of the future is not raised in this case, nor in any of the numerous cases that resemble it.

Here is another which evidently belongs to the same class, though at first sight it seems to postulate the preexistence of a fatal event and a vision of the future corresponding exactly with a vision of the past. A traveler in South America is descending a river in a canoe; the party are just about to run close to a promontory when a sort of mysterious voice, which he has already heard at different momentous times of his life, imperiously orders him immediately to cross the river and gain the other shore as quickly as possible. This appears so absurd that he is obliged to threaten the Indians with death to force them to take this course. They have scarcely crossed more than half the river when the promontory falls at the very place where they meant to round it.

The perception of imminent danger is here, I admit, even more abnormal than in the previous example, but it comes under the same heading. It is a phenomenon of subliminal hypersensitiveness observed more than once, a sort of premonition induced by subconscious perceptions, which has been christened by the barbarous name of "cryptaesthesia." But the interval between the moment when the peril is signalled and that at which it is consummated is too short for those questions which relate to a knowledge or a preexistence of the future to arise in this instance.

The case is almost the same with the adventure of an American dentist, very carefully investigated by Dr. Hodgson. The dentist was bending over a bench on which was a little copper in which he was vulcanizing some rubber, when he heard a voice calling, in a quick and imperative manner, these words:

"Run to the window, quick! Run to the window, quick!"

He at once ran to the window and looked out to the street below, when suddenly he heard a tremendous report and, looking round, saw that the copper had exploded, destroying a great part of the workroom.

Here again, a subconscious cautiousness was probably amused by certain indications imperceptible to our ordinary senses. It is even possible that there exists between things and ourselves a sort of sympathy or subliminal communion which makes us experience the trials and emotions of matter that has reached the limits of its existence, unless, as is more likely, there is merely a simple coincidence between the chance idea of a possible explosion and its realization.

A last and rather more complicated case is that of Jean Dupre, the sculptor, who was driving alone with his wife along a mountain road, skirting a perpendicular cliff. Suddenly they both heard a voice that seemed to come from the mountain crying:

"Stop!"

They turned round, saw nobody and continued their road. But the cries were repeated again and again, without anything to reveal the presence of a human being amid the solitude. At last the sculptor alighted and saw that the left wheel of the carriage, which was grazing the edge of the precipice, had lost its linch-pin and was on the point of leaving the axle-tree, which would almost inevitably have hurled the carriage into the abyss.

About the Author

Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 - May 6, 1949) was a Belgian poet, playwright, and essayist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life.