An Experiment with Time, by J. W. Dunne
Priceless British philosophizing from the Roaring Twenties
(Review posted 20 Jun 2004 01:42:14)

Viewed purely and unforgivingly in terms of its subject matter, this book is pretty standard crank stuff: man notices that some stuff that happens reminds him of dreams that he remembers having had recently, decides that dreams can see into the future, gets some of his friends to write down their dreams and discovers confirming evidence there, constructs bold revolutionary theory involving lots of graphs about how it all works and how consciousness is an infinite regress of observers who are all fascinated by "the present" when we're awake but whose attention can wander across time when we're asleep.

So the cool thing about this, and I do think it's way cool, is that it was written in the 1920's sometime, by an upperclass English dude who talks casually about how a certain thing happened to him while he was in Africa testing out his new design for an airplane wing or whatever, and you can (I can) just picture him as this polymath steampunk kind of guy, inventing an improved submarine before tea and a new philosophical system during, all with the sort of calm assumption that of course that's what we do in this exciting modern decade of the 1920's, that's what it's all about.

What I have is the third edition of the book, and it contains little extra notes and commentary and explanations directed at people who commented on and responded to the first two editions: Sir Arthur Eddington F. R. S. (an actual important astrophysicist of the time) wrote him a few lines; H. G. Wells apparently wrote him not to take "The Time Machine" so seriously; a Miss Cleugh wrote him about the difference between an event and a happening; and so on. And he responds most soberly to all of them. I inevitably picture them all sitting in the train, or in a sitting-room or a country garden, reading the Times of London and their latest correspondance from that interesting Mr. Dunne.

It was (at least in retrospect, and in my imagination) a more innocent time, at least for the intelligensia of the West, a more optimistic time, when all seemed under control, and possible. Which, come to think of it, is probably what people sixty or eighty years from now will say about these early days of the Web. (There's a humbling thought.)