• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 445 0

simply felt like it. The unwieldy title was The Ruminations of a Foreign Traveller in His Element, and it has more in common with the work of ‘Number Six’ than one might expect. Although sex is never discussed by the Doctor, much of his Ruminations takes the form of a catalogue, an assemblage of demons fought, people encountered and dream-worlds visited, in no order that makes much sense. But as tantrists such as Lisa-Beth made a strong connection between the body and the world of ‘private time’ (indeed, violent or unpleasant perversions such as those listed in Sodom are referred to in many texts as ‘demons’), modern psychologists might find peculiar parallels between the two works. It’s interesting to think what might have happened if the Doctor and Number Six had compared notes.

The Doctor was no author. He saw himself as an adventurer, a gentleman-traveller, and as a result his Ruminations is an awkward and often deliberately obtuse work. His thoughts fill the pages as though the memories of several lifetimes have been painfully scrambled and forced into words. Then again, the book was most probably written for a readership familiar with coded alchemical texts. Although the Ruminations was eventually published in 1783, it had a tiny circulation. A copy is known to have been held in the Windsor bookshop for several years afterwards. Yet however tangled it might be, the book contains several insights into the Doctor’s thoughts at this stage. Here, for example, are some telling notes on the topic of mortality:

The purpose of all alchemy is to find the Philosopher’s Stone, the key to immortality. But let us suppose there was a coven, or a whole race of people, which had discovered such a Stone. Let us suppose that if a member of this race died, his body could heal itself and allow the man to live again. There is a problem, naturally. Death means change; ergo, without death there would be no change. The society of such a people would be a dreary and stagnant one… [but] let us not imagine they would be fools. They would realise this. The Philosopher’s Stone has the ability to re-make a man as he was before he suffered his unfortunate death, but in an effort to allow at least some development in their society these immortal folk might mix the Stone with other compounds… to ensure that when a man of their number was re-born, he would become a new man. Therefore change among these people would be a case of sudden and jarring steps rather than a constant spectrum of development. In this race, each man would be his own coven…

The difficulty with such stability is that it goes against the grain of all other life in the universe. Even if such a race were not entirely unchanging, their lack of motion might cause them to become as a solid rock in the middle of a river. All other life would flow around them, until the universe itself accepted their presence as part of its function. Terrible to imagine the consequences of such a race being suddenly removed from that universe.

All this is speculation, though, because I can truthfully say that no such race exists in this universe…

And this is in a section of the book that’s supposed to be about the habits of pigeons.

Later in the book, he returns to the subject of these ‘immortals’ and suggests that if they existed, they could use the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ to rebirth themselves in any number of new forms, ‘from great three-headed things to bodies made of pure heat’. Again, we get the impression of a man who’s been pushing his limits ever since his arrival (Scarlette records that although Fitz and Anji accepted the Doctor’s marriage without question, they did so ‘in a manner which told me they were merely so shocked as not to dwell on it’). It was as if the Doctor had suddenly realised that the Philosopher’s Stone was his, and that there were no others of his kind to limit the way in which it was used. What’s most striking of all is the tone of surprise that runs through the book, the sense that the Doctor hadn’t even considered these ideas until he’d put pen to paper and let his subconscious