CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE ENGLAND, 1936
The little blue book Thea had given me was a small point of obsession. I had a curious attraction to Fulvia. Maybe she was more attainable than a younger woman and safer. I was, after all, a Satyr, and we are driven by our desire to procreate more strongly than a normal man.
Perhaps Fulvia represented an ideal where I could safely focus my erotic instincts without risking the responsibility of fatherhood, where I wouldn’t have to find out if I would be as reprobate as my own father had been.
I had poured myself a nice cup of Earl Grey with a generous amount of half-cream and sat down in my wingback chair in our sitting room in the early morning hours while Thea was still sleeping. I took up the book. Lecture Notes, Christ Church Oxford, 1936.
I was unsure how turbulent this ride would be, but as I opened the book, I sensed the most delicate magic, like down pillows and flannel blankets on a winter morning. There was a smell, too, like the wind that passed through a cornfield. It swirled about me, and unlike my previous experience with an oneirotic tome, I did not hallucinate but felt fully drawn into the book, into its private world.
I found myself sitting in a cosy room with wood panelling. The walls were adorned with pre-raphaelite paintings by artists whose names were just on the tip of my tongue. There were people around me, though they couldn’t detect me. Mostly gentlemen in their middle age. All were well dressed.
There was a man with a mop of black hair and a pinched sort of face. He had a large nose and a wide forehead. He had the gentlest cleft in his chin. There was a lovely blond woman perched on a desk that our chairs surrounded. She was very pretty, with flowing blond locks. It was Fulvia, though she looked — well, normal. She was beautiful, of course, but nowhere near as tall and buxom as the Fulvia I knew. She was young; she couldn’t be more than twenty-five. She was thin with a small waist, and she wore a plain blue dress with a Fleur-de-lys pendant.
“As you know, gentlemen,” said the dark-haired man, “Mademoiselle Deadlocke was matriculated only six years hence and has made quite a stir with her latest publication. While I don’t see her work as set against my recent philosophical dalliance of Language, truth and Logic nor against emotivism, I’ve asked her here to expound her theories in a private lecture.”
Fulvia smiled. “I don’t think anything I have to say is against emotivism at all, Professor Ayers; in fact, I’d say it dovetails quite nicely with those ideas. My premise is very simple, the philosophies of man are built on a foundation of instincts, primarily for or against social apoptosis.”
A small square man with a balding head and round glasses took out his pipe and jabbed it into the air. “Are you suggesting there are no objective moral foundations to philosophies, that it’s all socially motivated instincts to death or power?”
“I don’t see it that way; I’m not really deriving it from Nietzsche. It would depend on the individual or his society’s morality and conception of purpose. The premise is pre-dialectic and even pre-moral; it’s more a will to life than power I suppose. But all of these fancy terms really only serve to obscure the issue. So I’ve come up with a very simple sort of thought experiment.”
Ayers leaned back in his chair. “Let us hear it then.”
Fulvia pushed herself off the desk and stood erect. “Consider two worlds. In one world, there is a man, his wife, and his four children.”
“Why four,” asked a lanky man with wild grey hair and a bushy moustache.
“For emotional effect mainly, one is too few, five too many, four seemed round and ideal. Anyway, imagine that tomorrow morning this man will wake up. He will go to his children’s room and murder each of them, one by one. Then he will murder his wife. Finally, he will kill himself.”
There was a general gasp in the room. “It’s rather sanguine. mademoiselle,” said Ayers.
“Yes, intentionally. That is the first world. In the second world, there are two families of the same composition, but in this world, the father will wake up the next morning and go to his neighbour’s house and will kill his neighbour’s children, one by one, and then he will kill his neighbour’s wife, and finally his neighbour.”
“Dear God!” said several of the gentlemen present. I thought it was just getting interesting.
“Quite,” said Fulvia. “The only question is, which family do you want to be born into? This is a thought experiment; you only have those two choices. There is no wrong answer. Some people will very seriously say that they would prefer to be born into the first, and some will say they would prefer to be born into the second.”
“I see,” said the grey-moustached man, “and from this, you draw what conclusion?”
“That some people are very much like the cells of the body and would prefer to die. They cannot properly articulate this desire. It is not a death instinct in the strictest sense; it is a biological sense of their unfitness for survival. It causes them to create philosophies that, no matter how idealistic they sound, are objectively horrible and will lead to nothing but their and everyone else’s deaths. They are aware of this at some level, and their pretences are part of their own self-delusion.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Professor Ayers rested his chin on his fist. “So I assume you mean to implicate something of Marxism or this new Fascism of Mussolini and Herr. Hitler?”
“In a certain sense, yes. Such philosophies are predicated on absurd ideals and identities. But the individuals who create and promote them know this. The great danger of such things is to give their adherents the benefit of the doubt or thinking they have good intentions, which they do not. They have nothing but suicidal intentions. I do not suggest this is specifically wrong. However, if you would prefer to be in the second world instead of the first, then there can be no resolution. But this idea is more primitive than sophisticated ideology. It’s as much at the root of Catharism as Bolshevism or even Nazism.”
The grey-moustached man raised a finger. “I perceive this is not entirely the philosophy, though. You seem to suggest by your thought experiment that murder is a necessity?”
“That is precisely the point. Any analysis of history will show that, eventually, slaughter is necessary. One’s philosophical alignment decides whether one annihilates others or annihilates the self. These same processes take place at every level of life. And they are at some pre-conscious level a matter of self-selection. Those who claim otherwise are simply the first type, and all their sophisticated ideology is merely a form of self-tranquillisation. ”
The grey-moustached man shifted uncomfortably. “You can’t be serious?”
“It requires a great deal of education to avoid the obvious. It is not merely that nature is red in tooth and claw; it is that absolutely every geographic area, and every single people in human history, built whatever age they found themselves in upon the corpses of those they replaced. This is really just an outgrowth of basic Thucydidean observations.”
Ayer’s perked up. “I suppose you’re relating this to Melian dialogue then.”
Fulvia nodded. “The Melians were essentially suicidal, and they accomplished their destruction effortlessly.”
The grey-moustached man guffawed. “But Melos was returned to them by Sparta when Athens lost the war.”
Fulvia snorted. “Don’t be silly; the token establishment of a reconstituted Melos was merely a Spartan pretence for establishing a military presence. The Athenians slaughtered all the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Those that could be brought back were essentially bred out of existence within a generation. Still, you miss the point entirely. The Melians were obviously silly, but the Athenians were even more silly for tyrannising them. Look what it got Athens? Sometimes two groups are merely arguing over the best way to commit suicide. Something the Athenian empire promptly accomplished. The Greeks have been little more than Imperial concubines ever since.”
Their talk continued along these lines for some time. It would not be possible for me to recreate it all here. They were not, on the whole, very receptive to her theories, and I don’t pretend to have fully understood why. Each one seemed to argue very pedantically from his own perspective. I, for one, was deeply biased in favour of Fulvia’s ideas due to my being rather taken with her and her inclusion of Bolsheviks in the negative aspects of her philosophical system.
My family had escaped Russia in the 1917 revolution, and so I had been raised with that profound sourness against them. I can’t quite say if I was objective on the matter or that I cared to be. One has no real reason to treat an enemy fairly.
As the time droned on, I found myself wanting to nod off. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know how to close the book. There was no book anymore; I was fully inside of it. Was there some word I had to say? Perhaps if I got up and left?
I tried to leave the room, but going through the door just brought me back to the same place. I tried pinching myself. I became quite frustrated and grabbed a letter opener from the desk and threw it straight at Professor Ayers. It stopped in mid-air. The room froze. Everyone was a blur of frozen motion.
“Would you kindly behave,” said Fulvia as she looked right at me.
“You can — ”
“— see you, yes. Am I really so boring, monsieur —”
“Nikolai Bozerenski, your grace,” I said.
“Grace? Hah. Who do you think I am?”
“You are Fulvia Deadlocke, la marquise de Languedoc?”
Fulvia looked around for a moment. “Marquise de Languedoc? That’s not possible. I know the Marquis de Languedoc; he’s a friend of my father. He’s an odious man. Are you suggesting — I married him?”
“I don’t know, to be frank, your grace, I don’t yet know you intimately. I suppose that is how you became a marquess.”
“Became? Oh. You’re from the future! This is impossible, though. How could you be?”
“The future? Not exactly. This is an oneirotic tome. But yes, it was written — oh eighty-seven years ago. So I guess, I’m from the future. From your perspective.”
“Written?” Fulvia asked.
“Yes, your grace, we are inside a book.”
“Eighty-seven years — well, it’s nice to see my ideas have stood the test of time.”
“I wouldn’t go that far; the book was given to me by a friend — I was lead to believe it wasn’t very successful.”
Fulvia lowered her head for a moment. Lost in thought. “Interesting. What is an oneirotic tome?”
“It’s — you really don’t know?”
“No, I have no idea.”
“It’s a sort of enchanted book, which is kind of interactive, I suppose? This one is incredibly detailed, actually. A very strong bit of magic, which is fascinating.”
“Magic? You can’t be serious.”
I stared at her. How could she not know about magic? “Yes, you’re a sorcerer.”
“What! You’re putting me on.” Fulvia paced. She placed her hand on her chin. She looked around the room and noticed that it was frozen in time. “You’re not putting me on.”
“No, your grace, I’m afraid not.”
“Am I alive?”
I reached out to touch her. She was warm and seemed so real, and then she returned the gesture and touched me. I must admit this was the most physical intimacy I’d ever had with her.
“I guess it’s all real then. I mean, I’ve dallied with Alchemy, of course. But I always considered it a kind of coded philosophy. Like the Christian version of Sufism. Disguising religious practices as proto-scientific research. But maybe it isn’t.” Fulvia drifted off.
“I don’t suppose you know how to turn this off?” I asked. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay all day. I had work to do.
“Turn it off?”
“I mean the book; I don’t know how to get back to — well, the real world.”
“I wasn’t aware I was living in a book until only a moment ago.”
“There must be a way?” I looked around the room. There was a Chippendale bookshelf behind the desk. It was full of books of varying colours, but they all had the same title and were by the same author.
“L. Frank Baum?”
Fulvia perked up.
“Yes, I love him. My favourite author.”
“I suppose I need some ruby slippers?”
“Ruby? You mean silver.”
“Ah, I’ve only seen the film.”
“They made it into a film? Oh, I wish I could see it.”
“Yes, they made it into a film in 1939.”
“Missed it by three years, I suppose.” Fulvia snapped her fingers and laughed.
I clicked my hooves together three times, but nothing happened.
Fulvia smiled. Her teeth aligned. “You have to say there’s no place like home.”