Time and Chance

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 375, 30 August 1946, Page 11

Time and Chance

INCE the first eccentric mathematician conceived the idea of travelling in time, and H. G. Wells got to hear about it, one particular problem has exercised the idle mind; how can you conceive time-travel without altering either (if you go back) the course of events which has led up to the present moment and produced the circumstances under which you set out, or else (if you go forward) altering the whole course of events among which your journey brings you? There seems no way out, The late Charles Williams once invented a necromancer who transported himself forward 30 minutes and spent the remainder of his days frantic with perplexity wondering whether he had experienced those 30 minutes. On a slightly less Einstinian level was Max Beerbohm’s fantasy of "Enoch Soames," broadcast by various YA stations of recent weeks. Soames is a forty-second-rate man of letters (a figure of real pathos) who sells his soul to the Devil (a flashy Continental pimp) to be transported forward a hundred years to the reading room of the British Museum, there to read the books which tell of his fame. But all he can find is a reference to himself as a! character int an (Continued on next page)

RADIO VIEWSREEL (Continued from previous page)

absurd story by one Max Beerbohm, about a forty-second-rate man of letters. who .... Alas, poor ghost! Beerbohm as the narrator of the story, can only console himself by deducing that the book Soames read was an early edition, that since its publication research has proved the truth of Beerbohm’s narrative, and that on the 9th of September, 1999, the reading-room is packed with persons waiting in awe for the apparition of Soames. Once one has launched into this sort of thing there is no end to the changes one can ring, and perhaps the young lady named Bright who travelled much faster than light and went out one day in a relative way, returning the previous night, said the last word on the subject; but the wit of "Enoch Soames" and its evocation of the fin-de-siecle literary world are superb.