The Magus - John Fowles [87]
one day be the greatest in the history of the human race. Join it now. Be among the first who saw, who joined, who stood! Across the last paragraph someone a long time before had scrawled the word _merde_. Both text and comment, in view of what had happened since 1920, seemed to me pathetic; like two little boys caught fighting at the time of an atomic explosion. We were equally tired, in midcentury, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the overcerebral and of the overfecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure. I listened to the house and the night outside. Silence; and turned to the other, bound, pamphlet. Once again, the cheap browning paper and the old-fashioned type showed it to be unmistakably a genuine prewar relic. ON COMMUNICATION WITH OTHER WORLDS To arrive at even the nearest stars man would have to travel for millions of years at the speed of light. Even if we had the means to travel at the speed of light we could not go to, and return from, any other inhabited area of the universe in any one lifetime; nor can we communicate by other scientific means, such as some gigantic heliograph or by radio waves. We are f orever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time. How futile all our excitement over airplanes! How stupid this fictional literature by writers like Verne and Wells about the peculiar beings that inhabit other planets! But it is without doubt that there are other planets round other stars, that life obeys universal norms, and that in the cosmos there are beings who have evolved in the same way and with the same aspirations as ourselves. Are we then condemned never to communicate with them? Only one method of communication is not dependent on time. Some deny that it exists. But there are many cases, reliably guaranteed by reputable and scientific witnesses, of thoughts being communicated at PRECISELY THE MOMENT they were conceived. Among certain primitive cultures, such as the Lapp, this phenomenon is so frequent, so accepted, that it is used as a matter of everyday convenience, as we in France use the telegraph or telephone. Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained. This is the only means we shall ever have of communicating with mankind in other worlds. _Sic itur ad astra_. This potential simultaneity of awareness in conscious beings operates as the pantograph does. As the hand draws, the copy is made. The writer of this pamphlet is not a spiritualist and is not interested in spiritualism. He has for some years been investigating telepathic and other phenomena on the fringe of normal medical science. His interests are purely scientific. He repeats that he does not believe in the "supernatural"; in Rosicrucianism, hermetism, and other such aberrations. He maintains that already more advanced worlds than our own are trying to communicate with us, and that a whole category of noble and beneficial mental behaviour, which appears in our societies as good conscience, humane deeds, artistic inspiration, scientific genius, is really dictated by half-understood telepathic messages from other worlds. He believes that the Muses are not a poetic fiction, but a classical insight into scientific reality we moderns should do well to investigate. He pleads for more public money and cooperation in research into telepathy and allied phenomena; above all he pleads for more scientists in this field. Shortly he will publish direct proof of the feasibility of intercommunication between worlds. Watch the Parisian press for an announcement. I had never had a telepathic experience in my life, and I thought it unlikely I should start with Conchis; and if benevolent gentlemen from other worlds were feeding good deeds and artistic genius into me, they had done it singularly badly--and not only for me, for most of the age I was born into. On the other hand, I began