The Time Machine.8: Who Makes the Future

“...there is a sense of courage to live for the future because we need no longer be helpless pawns of circumstance but may confidently embark on a course of action to influence the future for good by fostering the best possible development of society and ultimately of the human race." 
 Roslynn D. Haynes

The Traveller sits in the sunshine of his last day in this future, grieving for the human race. His afternoon musings end with a nap. He awakens as evening approaches, and calmly walks towards the building where he is sure the time machine is hidden. With a few remaining matches in his pocket, he carries his crowbar to pry open the bronze door.

He is surprised to find the door open and his time machine visible inside. He drops his crowbar and enters confidently, realizing it is likely to be a trap. Sure enough the bronze door closes and he is in darkness. But he has his matches, and the Morlocks, their eyes remade for darkness, will scatter with the bright light and fire.

Except that these matches won’t light without the edge of the box to strike them on, something he hadn’t noticed before. It is the last in the series of his obvious absent-minded blunders, which began when he failed to equip himself for his time journey in the first place.

The Morlocks attack him but he manages to attach the crucial levers he carried, and he engages the machine. Fighting off Morlocks, he isn’t quite in control of the machine and it careens into the future.

Once again he goes forward, at first accidentally and then several more times deliberately for short visits leading up to the awesomely quiet, gruesomely garish last gasps of the world, shortly before entropy's final triumph. He encounters several life forms, including giant crabs, and a small creature the size of a human head crawling out of a still sea. He is witnessing the last moments of the living planet Earth.

The timing of the world’s end and its general nature are in accord with the science of the times, though later surmises differ. Nevertheless, the eloquence of Wells’ writing remains. This vision greatly impressed readers of the time. It may well be, as Ursula LeGuin wrote, that with this book and this passage in particular, the end of the world first becomes a subject of fiction.

Yet this desolate moment is ennobled for us because the Traveller is there. Once again—and in a sense for the last time—human witnessing transforms what seems to be the cold mechanisms of the universe into something soulful, through the human medium of story.

The Traveller's brief visits to the long distant death of life in a final exhaustion, is more than a coda to the longer tale. It seems to follow from the horrific stasis of the Eloi/Morloch period. Ironically, this is the first story about change through evolutionary time, yet it dwells on a society in which there is no longer even an obvious potential for change.

Humanity has divided against itself, and its houses of culture cannot stand. Without a synthesis that is synonymous with soul, entropy had no countering principle, no gathering of energy and organization. Poetically more than literally, this scene reinforces the sense of doom unwinding from the failure of humanity.

The Traveller returns home, and tells his story. No one believes him. The next day the narrator (whose name, we have just indirectly learned, is Hillyer) sees the Traveller disappear on his time machine.

Disappearance leaves us with a mystery of where the Traveller is, what happened to him, whether he might come back, and of "what happens next"—the momentum of the endless story as well as the mythical promise of the return.

We now see why there was a narrator other than the Traveller in the first place: to confirm the sight of him disappearing on his machine, to tell us that he has vanished for three years, and to leave us with a message of hope in a pretty bleak story.

Readers might find hope for our future in the Traveller's ethical behavior, in his openness to the value of beauty, and in the message—the prophesy-- he brought back as a cautionary tale.

But within the story the hope expressed is by the narrator as he reflects on the Traveller's story and his disappearance. He acknowledges that the Traveller "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end."

Though this is not Hillyer's view he still concludes, "If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so."

To do that requires not denial but stretching the human capability for complex thinking and feeling and acting to meet the challenges of a complex world.

Hillyer’s statement suggests an often quoted observation by the 20th century American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald: "…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

This statement is in turn often seen as an extension of John Keats’ definition of ‘Negative Capability,’ or the ability to remain in a state of uncertainty and doubt. Fitzgerald did admire Keats, but he also admired Wells. (There’s even a long discussion of Wells towards the end of Fitzgerald’s college novel, This Side of Paradise.)  He likely read The Time Machine and Hillyer's statement.

Further suggestion of that comes in Fitzgerald's rarely quote next sentence. He went on to give an example—a very apt example in the light of Hillyer’s observation at the end of The Time Machine.  Fitzgerald’s full statement is this:

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

To the ultimate narrator of The Time Machine, the future is still blank, still full of possibilities, as it is for us. This may well be another reason the story is told by Hillyer: he has not experienced the future that the Traveller saw, but only heard an account of it. So for him the future is still what hasn’t happened yet.

If we take the full Fitzgerald statement as an interpretation of Hillyer's, is it what Wells meant? There is some evidence that it is.

A little more than a decade after this book’s publication, Wells walked the White House grounds with President Theodore Roosevelt. He recounted the conversation in his autobiography of the 1930s.

 Roosevelt brought up the vision of the future Wells created in The Time Machine. “’Suppose, after all,’ he said slowly, ‘that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The effort’s real. It’s worth going on with. It’s worth it. It’s worth it, even so...’”

In an earlier paragraph, Wells had already summed up Teddy Roosevelt’s attitude towards “a pessimistic interpretation of the future,” by using—without quotation marks—Hillyer’s words: “Only he chose to live as if this were not so.”

Many years later, on the eve of World War II, Wells affirmed his own similar belief regarding the human future.  "I think the odds are against man," he wrote, "but it is still worth fighting against them."

We should also recall that this future depicted in The Time Machine is not a specific prediction. It’s a story. It depicts one possible way the future could evolve from the present. The way to avoid that future is to change the cause—the stark and growing division of rich and poor-- in the present.

A few years after The Time Machine was published, Wells told an interviewer that he never intended its future to be seen as inevitable and a reason for despair.

“The great thing I had in my mind, as the book developed, was this—the responsibility of men to mankind. Unless humanity hangs together, unless all strive for the species as a whole, we shall end in disaster.”

To live as though it were not so is to help form a future in which humanity survives as a whole: body, mind, spirit and soul. Because hope for the future is a condition of the present. As is the effort to save the future.

To be continued... For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.