The Unknown Guest - Maurice Maeterlinck

To catch a glimpse of this strange problem of the preexistence of the future, as it shows itself to each of us, let us essay more humbly to translate it into tangible images, to place it as it were upon the stage. I am writing these lines sitting on a stone, in the shade of some tall beeches that overlook a little Norman village. It is one of those lovely summer days when the sweetness of life is almost visible in the azure vase of earth and sky. In the distance stretches the immense, fertile valley of the Seine, with its green meadows planted with restful trees, between which the river flows like a long path of gladness leading to the misty hills of the estuary. I am looking down on the village-square, with its ring of young lime-trees. A procession leaves the church and, amid prayers and chanting, they carry the statue of the Virgin around the sacred pile. I am conscious of all the details of the ceremony: the sly old cure perfunctorily bearing a small reliquary; four choirmen opening their mouths to bawl forth vacantly the Latin words which convey nothing to them; two mischievous serving-boys in frayed cassocks; a score of little girls, young girls and old maids in white, all starched and flounced, followed by six or seven village notables in baggy frockcoats. The pageant disappears behind the trees, comes into sight again at the bend of the road and hurries back into the church. The clock in the steeple strikes five, as though to ring down the curtain and mark in the infinite history of events which none will recollect the conclusion of a spectacle which never again, until the end of the world and of the universe of worlds, will be just what it was during those seconds when it beguiled my wandering eyes.

For in vain will they repeat the procession next year and every year after: never again will it be the same. Not only will several of the actors probably have disappeared, but all those who resume their old places in the ranks will have undergone the thousand little visible and invisible changes wrought by the passing days and weeks. In a word, this insignificant moment is unique, irrecoverable, inimitable, as are all the moments in the existence of all things; and this little picture, enduring for a few seconds suspended in boundless duration, has lapsed into eternity, where henceforth it will remain in its entirety to the end of time, so much so that, if a man could one day recapture in the past, among what some one has called the "astral negatives," the image of what it was, he would find it intact, unchanged, ineffaceable and undeniable.

It is not difficult for us to conceive that one can thus go back and see again the astral negative of an event that is no more; and retrospective clairvoyance appears to us a wonderful but not an impossible thing. It astonishes but does not stagger our reason. But, when it becomes a question of discovering the same picture in the future, the boldest imagination flounders at the first step. How are we to admit that there exists somewhere a representation or reproduction of that which has not yet existed? Nevertheless, some of the incidents which we have just been considering seem to prove in an almost conclusive manner not only that such representations are possible, but that we may arrive at them more frequently, not to say more conveniently, than at those of the past. Now, once this representation preexists, as we are obliged to admit in the case of certain number of premonitions, the riddle remains the same whether the preexistence be one of a few hours, a few years or several centuries. It is therefore possible—for, in these matters, we must go straight to extremes or else leave them alone—it is therefore possible that a seer mightier than any of to-day, some god, demigod or demon, some unknown, universal or vagrant intelligence, saw that procession a million years ago, at a time when nothing existed of that which composes and surrounds it and when the very earth on which it moves had not yet risen from the ocean depths. And other seers, as mighty as the first, who from age to age contemplated the same spot and the same moment, would always have perceived, through the vicissitudes and upheavals of seas, shores and forests, the same procession going round the same little church that still lay slumbering in the oceanic ooze and made up of the same persons sprung from a race that was perhaps not yet represented on the earth.

It is obviously difficult for us to understand that the future can thus precede chaos, that the present is at the same time the future and the past, or that that which does not yet exists already at the same time at which it is no more. But, on the other hand, it is just as hard to conceive that the future does not preexist, that there is nothing before the present and that everything is only present or past. It is very probable that, to a more universal intelligence than ours, everything is but an eternal present, an immense punctum stans, as the metaphysicians say, in which all the events are on one plane; but it is no less probable that we ourselves, so long as we are men, in order to understand anything of this eternal present, will always be obliged to divide it into three parts. Thus caught between two mysteries equally baffling to our intelligence, whether we deny or admit the preexistence of the future, we are really only wrangling over words: in the one case, we give the name of "present," from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, to that which to us is the future; in the other, we give the name of "future" to that which, from the point of view of a perfect intelligence, is the present. But, after all, it is incontestable in both cases that, at least from our point of view, the future preexists, since preexistence is the only name by which we can describe and the only form under which we can conceive that which we do not yet see in the present.

Attempts have been made to shed light on the riddle by transferring it to space. It is true that it there loses the greater part of its obscurity; but this apparently is because, in changing its environment, it has completely changed its nature and no longer bears any relation to what it was when it was placed in time. We are told, for instance, that innumerable cities distributed over the surface of the earth are to us as if they were not, so long as we have not seen them, and only begin to exist on the day when we visit them. That is true; but space, outside all metaphysical speculations, has realities for us which time does not possess. Space, although very mysterious and incomprehensible once we pass certain limits, is nevertheless not, like time, incomprehensible and illusory in all its parts. We are certainly quite able to conceive that those towns which we have never seen and doubtless never will see indubitably exist, whereas we find it much more difficult to imagine that the catastrophe which, fifty years hence, will annihilate one of them already exists as really as the town itself. We are capable of picturing a spot whence, with keener eyes than these which we boast to-day, we should see in one glance all the cities of the earth and even those of other worlds, but it is much less easy for us to imagine a point in the ages whence we should simultaneously discover the past, the present and the future because the past, the present and the future are three orders of duration which cannot find room at the same time in our intelligence and which inevitably devour one other. How can we picture to ourselves, for instance, a point in eternity at which our little procession already exists, while it is not yet and although it is no more? Add to this the thought that it is necessary and inevitable, from the millenaries which had no beginning, that, at a given moment, at a given place, the little procession should leave the little church in a given manner and that no known or imaginable will can change anything in it, in the future any more than in the past; and we begin to understand that there is no hope of understanding.