The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again,
that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. Time walks
beside us and flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus
given often dazzles us, and deepens the darkness which is in front. We
can see but little at a time, and heed that little far less than our
apprehension of what we shall see next; ever peering curiously through
the glare of the present into the gloom of the future, we presage the
leading lines of that which is before us, by faintly reflected lights
from dull mirrors that are behind, and stumble on as we may till the
trap-door opens beneath us and we are gone.
They say at other times that the future and the past are as a panorama
upon two rollers; that which is on the roller of the future unwraps
itself on to the roller of the past; we cannot hasten it, and we may
not stay it; we must see all that is unfolded to us whether it be good
or ill; and what we have seen once we may see again no more. It is ever
unwinding and being wound; we catch it in transition for a moment, and
call it present; our flustered senses gather what impression they can,
and we guess at what is coming by the tenor of that which we have seen.
The same hand has painted the whole picture, and the incidents vary
little—rivers, woods, plains, mountains, towns and peoples, love,
sorrow, and death: yet the interest never flags, and we look hopefully
for some good fortune, or fearfully lest our own faces be shown us as
figuring in something terrible. When the scene is past we think we know
it, though there is so much to see, and so little time to see it, that
our conceit of knowledge as regards the past is for the most part
poorly founded; neither do we care about it greatly, save in so far as
it may affect the future, wherein our interest mainly lies.
The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars and
all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and not from
west to east, and in like manner they say it is by chance that man is
drawn through life with his face to the past instead of to the future.
For the future is there as much as the past, only that we may not see
it. Is it not in the loins of the past, and must not the past alter
before the future can do so?
Sometimes, again, they say that there was a race of men tried upon the
earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they
died in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused
them; and if any were to be born too prescient now, he would be culled
out by natural selection, before he had time to transmit so
peace-destroying a faculty to his descendants.
Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must
perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no
better than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the
devils.
Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last to
the unborn themselves, and found that they were held to be souls pure
and simple, having no actual bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous
yet more or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they
have thus neither flesh nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are
supposed to have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell,
though these are as unsubstantial as their inhabitants; they are even
thought to eat and drink some thin ambrosial sustenance, and generally
to be capable of doing whatever mankind can do, only after a visionary
ghostly fashion as in a dream. On the other hand, as long as they
remain where they are they never die—the only form of death in the
unborn world being the leaving it for our own. They are believed to be
extremely numerous, far more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown
planets, full grown, in large batches at a time; but they can only
leave the unborn world by taking the steps necessary for their arrival
here—which is, in fact, by suicide.
They ought to be an exceedingly happy people, for they have no extremes
of good or ill fortune; never marrying, but living in a state much like
that fabled by the poets as the primitive condition of mankind. In
spite of this, however, they are incessantly complaining; they know
that we in this world have bodies, and indeed they know everything else
about us, for they move among us whithersoever they will, and can read
our thoughts, as well as survey our actions at pleasure. One would
think that this should be enough for them; and most of them are indeed
alive to the desperate risk which they will run by indulging themselves
in that body with “sensible warm motion” which they so much desire;
nevertheless, there are some to whom the _ennui_ of a disembodied
existence is so intolerable that they will venture anything for a
change; so they resolve to quit. The conditions which they must accept
are so uncertain, that none but the most foolish of the unborn will
consent to them; and it is from these, and these only, that our own
ranks are recruited.
When they have finally made up their minds to leave, they must go
before the magistrate of the nearest town, and sign an affidavit of
their desire to quit their then existence. On their having done this,
the magistrate reads them the conditions which they must accept, and
which are so long that I can only extract some of the principal points,
which are mainly the following:-
First, they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and
sense of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a
will of their own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before
they go, and take them, such as they are, for better or worse—neither
are they to be allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they
so much desire; they are simply allotted by chance, and without appeal,
to two people whom it is their business to find and pester until they
adopt them. Who these are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind,
healthy or diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to
entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good
constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.
It is curious to read the lectures which the wiser heads give to those
who are meditating a change. They talk with them as we talk with a
spendthrift, and with about as much success.
“To be born,” they say, “is a felony—it is a capital crime, for which
sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the
offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty
years, but what is that, compared with the eternity you now enjoy? And
even though the sentence were commuted, and you were allowed to live on
for ever, you would in time become so terribly weary of life that
execution would be the greatest mercy to you.
“Consider the infinite risk; to be born of wicked parents and trained
in vice! to be born of silly parents, and trained to unrealities! of
parents who regard you as a sort of chattel or property, belonging more
to them than to yourself! Again, you may draw utterly unsympathetic
parents, who will never be able to understand you, and who will do
their best to thwart you (as a hen when she has hatched a duckling),
and then call you ungrateful because you do not love them; or, again,
you may draw parents who look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it
is still young, lest it should give them trouble hereafter by having
wishes and feelings of its own.
“In later life, when you have been finally allowed to pass muster as a
full member of the world, you will yourself become liable to the
pesterings of the unborn—and a very happy life you may be led in
consequence! For we solicit so strongly that a few only—nor these the
best—can refuse us; and yet not to refuse is much the same as going
into partnership with half-a-dozen different people about whom one can
know absolutely nothing beforehand—not even whether one is going into
partnership with men or women, nor with how many of either. Delude not
yourself with thinking that you will be wiser than your parents. You
may be an age in advance of those whom you have pestered, but unless
you are one of the great ones you will still be an age behind those who
will in their turn pester you.
“Imagine what it must be to have an unborn quartered upon you, who is
of an entirely different temperament and disposition to your own; nay,
half-a-dozen such, who will not love you though you have stinted
yourself in a thousand ways to provide for their comfort and
well-being,—who will forget all your self-sacrifice, and of whom you
may never be sure that they are not bearing a grudge against you for
errors of judgement into which you may have fallen, though you had
hoped that such had been long since atoned for. Ingratitude such as
this is not uncommon, yet fancy what it must be to bear! It is hard
upon the duckling to have been hatched by a hen, but is it not also
hard upon the hen to have hatched the duckling?
“Consider it again, we pray you, not for our sake but for your own.
Your initial character you must draw by lot; but whatever it is, it can
only come to a tolerably successful development after long training;
remember that over that training you will have no control. It is
possible, and even probable, that whatever you may get in after life
which is of real pleasure and service to you, will have to be won in
spite of, rather than by the help of, those whom you are now about to
pester, and that you will only win your freedom after years of a
painful struggle in which it will be hard to say whether you have
suffered most injury, or inflicted it.
“Remember also, that if you go into the world you will have free will;
that you will be obliged to have it; that there is no escaping it; that
you will be fettered to it during your whole life, and must on every
occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given
time, no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your
mind will be a balance for considerations, and your action will go with
the heavier scale. How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of
scales which you may have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have
obtained by use, and the weight of the immediate considerations. If the
scales were good to start with, and if they have not been outrageously
tampered with in childhood, and if the combinations into which you
enter are average ones, you may come off well; but there are too many
‘ifs’ in this, and with the failure of any one of them your misery is
assured. Reflect on this, and remember that should the ill come upon
you, you will have yourself to thank, for it is your own choice to be
born, and there is no compulsion in the matter.
“Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a
certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to
very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a
man’s life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and
few indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing
with the miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and
handsome, you have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it
will be left at sixty? For you must live on your capital; there is no
investing your powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for
ever: you must eat up your principal bit by bit, and be tortured by
seeing it grow continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen
to escape being rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty.
“Remember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty who would not
come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with decency
and honour. Being in the world he will as a general rule stay till he
is forced to go; but do you think that he would consent to be born
again, and re-live his life, if he had the offer of doing so? Do not
think it. If he could so alter the past as that he should never have
come into being at all, do you not think that he would do it very
gladly?
“What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was not this,
when he cried out upon the day in which he was born, and the night in
which it was said there is a man child conceived? ‘For now,’ he says,
‘I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then had
I been at rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built
desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who
filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden untimely birth, I had
not been; as infants which never saw light. There the wicked cease from
troubling, and the weary are at rest.’ Be very sure that the guilt of
being born carries this punishment at times to all men; but how can
they ask for pity, or complain of any mischief that may befall them,
having entered open-eyed into the snare?
“One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a
dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall
feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its
work, and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavours
vainly to return; we say in such a moment, when you clutch at the dream
but it eludes your grasp, and you watch it, as Orpheus watched
Eurydice, gliding back again into the twilight kingdom, fly—fly—if you
can remember the advice—to the haven of your present and immediate
duty, taking shelter incessantly in the work which you have in hand.
This much you may perhaps recall; and this, if you will imprint it
deeply upon your every faculty, will be most likely to bring you safely
and honourably home through the trials that are before you.”[3]
This is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be for
leaving them, but it is seldom that they do much good, for none but the
unquiet and unreasonable ever think of being born, and those who are
foolish enough to think of it are generally foolish enough to do it.
Finding, therefore, that they can do no more, the friends follow
weeping to the courthouse of the chief magistrate, where the one who
wishes to be born declares solemnly and openly that he accepts the
conditions attached to his decision. On this he is presented with a
potion, which immediately destroys his memory and sense of identity,
and dissipates the thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited: he
becomes a bare vital principle, not to be perceived by human senses,
nor to be by any chemical test appreciated. He has but one instinct,
which is that he is to go to such and such a place, where he will find
two persons whom he is to importune till they consent to undertake him;
but whether he is to find these persons among the race of Chowbok or
the Erewhonians themselves is not for him to choose.