News from the Moon, page 19
“Do you think that nature cares about such ridiculous classifications? She creates figs, plums and almonds full of life and freshness, and man makes dried fruits and sweetmeats of them, artificial products that have nothing to do with the universal laws of biology. It is the same with ideas: true or false, plausible or mad, they are entirely the work of human genius, and the greatest folly of all is to pretend that distinctions derived from laws exclusively relevant to living things apply to them.
“No, Monsieur, there is nothing in the world but facts on the one side, and ideas on the other. As for rationalizations, classifications and theories, they’re nothing but smoke–variously colored smoke, in which, I am convinced, one sees the occasional spark glowing here and there, or even, on feast-days, bright fireworks suddenly erupt. But all of it passes like a cloud, like a flash of lightning; it all fades away, and darkness closes in again on momentarily-dazzled reason.
“Things, on the other hand–facts–are what last, what do not change according to the fancy of the hand that touches them or the eye that looks at them. Whether or not it is necessary for you to pass through vertigo and madness to arrive at them, what have you to complain about, if I lead you to facts and things?”
“Monsieur,” I said to him, casually settling back into my seat, “you interest me greatly, and I am listening. I have, indeed, often asked myself whether the distinction between reason and madness has as much value as is the general accord attributes to it, and you will lift a great weight from my shoulders if you can prove to me that one can arrive at the truth as directly by unreason as by reason.”
“One could not put it better,” he told me. “What the vulgar call unreason is to reason in a direction contrary to other men, acting or thinking other than they do. This is the sense in which I am mad, which is why everyone in the house–from the porter who lodges on the ground floor to my housekeeper, who roosts under the roof–takes me for a certified lunatic, to the point of looking suspiciously even at the people who come to see me. You must have...”
“I noticed that! That was why the porter stared at me in such a peculiar way!”
“You see! Isn’t that just what I said? But let’s get on! Let’s leave the stupid to their stupidity, and mind our own business. To begin with, as regards the question of moray eels, here are texts photographed from the Eugubine Tablets, in which I have marked the essential paragraphs. You may take them home to study them at your leisure. I shall soon put before your eyes documents much more explicit and definitive. Before I do that, however, it is necessary that I should acquaint you with the sequence of ideas and endeavors that I had to undertake to acquaint myself with the facts that I want to reveal to you.
“Have you ever had occasion to think about the conditions under which history presents itself to us? For me, ever since my studies began, I have felt a certain unease in the face of these stories of past events, comparable to that which one experiences in looking at certain portraits. One sees a nose, a mouth, eyes, a body, and yet one feels that it does not represent a man; the portrait is nothing but an implausible image, equally lacking in life and truth.
“I have experienced the same thing in confrontation with historic depictions in general, its strength varying in proportion to the nearness of the events to our own time–and in the end, I discovered the reason. In effect, the closer the events are to us, the more the historian’s interests become engaged in his interpretation of historical facts–and interpretation is only one step removed from distortion.
“Fundamentally, there are only two kinds of historical method. One consists of accepting facts, subject to the extraction therefrom of conclusions formulated in advance. The other similarly decides to give precedence to preconceived ideas, arranging–inventing, if necessary–facts to justify them. I cannot see anything much to choose between Louis Blanc making the 1789 Revolution begin with John Huss and Père Loriquet describing the reign of Louis XVIII at a time when Napoleon was on the throne, from the point-of-view of verity.65 The latter method is undoubtedly more candid and more logical than the former, but I have to admit that one is worth little more than the other. And when I sought such documents as were recoverable to check the proofs of such and such a fact given credence by people, I saw that every work of history was scarcely more than a copy of preceding works, with a few additional inaccuracies or speculations.
“After living with that dispiriting conviction for some time, I was led to conclude that people would not be able to flatter themselves that they understand history until the day when they would be able to equip themselves with a means of seeing retrospectively, not in stories and tales, but in reality.”
“That would indeed,” I said, laughing, “be history’s ideal. Unfortunately, facts vanish as soon as they are manifest, and they leave no perceptible trace of their passing.”
“I don’t share your opinion,” Monsieur Durand replied. “Facts, in producing themselves, acquire an existence as positive and as indestructible as that of ideas. Like ideas, they take flight across the world, the one soaring unapprehended in space as the other circulates in the memory and traditions of humankind. They never die, any more than ideas do, and they nourish, by means of a continuously accumulated heredity, the treasure of the universal soul. They are somewhere; they are everywhere. Whatever their origin, however far time has carried them away, the universe remains their cage, if you will, and they are not departed from it. And given that I too am within that cage, why can I not reach them?”
“In thought, I will admit–but in experience, in sensation...”
“Yes... I forgive you the objection. It must have a certain force, since it held me up for more than 25 years...”
“What!” I exclaimed. “You have overcome that objection?”
“Yes,” he replied, in a firm tone. “After 25 years of meditation and anguish, I have overcome it, thanks to the wave theory of light.”
“The wave theory of light?”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“But what connection has that theory with the facts of history?”
“The one that every visible phenomenon has with the eyes that see it; the one established between the table that you are looking at and your intelligence, which perceives the sensation. What is the connection called? Vision.”
“But for vision to operate a real object is necessary.”
“I tell you that facts are real objects.”
“Even past facts?”
“Even past facts. I shall prove it. You know that an illuminated object, touched by light, emits from every point on its surface waves that propagate in a straight line as far as the retina of the eye, producing the sight of the object–isn’t that so?”
“I understand that.”
“You understand it–good! But have you ever asked yourself what becomes of these waves beyond the point at which your eye perceives their passage? Isn’t it true that this perception, particular to you, does not stop them, and that they continue to progress in a straight line, indefinitely?”
“Not indefinitely. If they encounter an opaque body in that line they are intercepted; an eye placed on the other side of the opaque body does not perceive them.”
“But if they are not intercepted, how far can they go?”
“As far, evidently, as there is empty space for their propagation.”
“So,” Monsieur Durand went on, “if every luminous object emits waves that propagate indefinitely in a straight line when they encounter no obstacle, do you not see that everything that exists on Earth, and everything that has happened there, everything that appeared there–if only for a second–since the origin of the world, has emitted images that took flight through the terrestrial atmosphere into interplanetary space? And what becomes of them there? Do they become immobile? Nothing can stop them. Do they become imperceptible? Nothing can diminish them. They are in a medium that is empty, free and neutral. So they are still there, invariably fixed in the order in which they exited from the terrestrial atmosphere. For all eternity, unable ever to deviate, they follow the straight line that leads them to infinity: every modification of every object; every movement and action of every living being.
“Lift your eyes to the Heavens, therefore, and if you know how to look, you will see there, projected from space to space and from profundity to profundity, the image of every being and the display of every fact that light has illuminated on the Earth’s surface since the beginning of time!”
Monsieur Durand paused, as if to give my attention the time to catch breath. He lowered his eyes momentarily to the ground, then lifted them to look at me interrogatively.
I was considerably disturbed because, despite the manifest absurdity of what I had heard, it had taken me aback; however strong-minded we may be, the infinite always makes our hearts beat faster.
“But if these images,” I said, “these projections of things, rise continuously from the surface of the Earth to follow a straight line into space, only the last emission from any given point on the globe can be visible. It must, in consequence, block the view of all those preceding it in the same direction. Thus, I admit that one can see the one, but I believe that it eclipses all the preceding ones.”
“You are forgetting,” he said, smiling, “two, three, or even four little things: that the Earth turns on its axis; that it oscillates on the same axis, in a rotational movement similar to the swaying of a spinning top; that it describes an ellipse around the Sun; and that the entire solar system moves as a whole in some direction or other. Now, as the Earth turns, changes position and oscillates in space, the result is that each luminous wave that it emits escapes from the atmosphere at a distinct tangent, in the manner of the sparks emitted by a firework, which draw apart as they become more distant. These tangents find enough space, at a very slight distance from the Earth, to diverge without being confused, and the only necessity is to move the point of observation outside the zone within which the waves are still intermingled. It’s a simple matter of calculating angles, a trivial detail.”
“But when one has admitted that,” I said to him, shaking my head, “there still remains another objection, this one insurmountable. If you could go out and place yourself beyond and in front of the point in space which they have reached at the present moment, in order to observe these images, you would be able to see them, because they would find your eyes in their path be reflected by your retina–but here you are behind the space that they occupy. They cannot turn back in their course in order to come and find your eyes.”
“That’s right,” he said, “but you’re still forgetting several things. First, it’s not absolutely true that we can only see objects placed in front of our eyes. The condition of opposition between the eye and the visible object is therefore not as absolute as you suppose. But even if it were conceded as absolute, if the images chance to find in following their course a screen of some kind to reflect them–that is to say, to send them back to me, is that not turning back in their course?”
“Oh, it would certainly be more convenient to place a screen out there than to go there yourself–and then, indeed, the images would be visible to you. But...”
“There is no but; that is the situation.”
“A screen in planetary space!” I cried, in amazement. “A screen in the void!”
“It is not a void; it is a medium of a particular nature, and however subtle you suppose it to be, it has a certain consistency, since it is not nothing. That consistency may vary at such and such a place, under the influence of such and such a cause.”
“In any case,” I said, “it is a transparent medium, whose precise nature is to transmit light. How can it reflect an image?”
“How? Just as the air reflects them, before our eyes, every day. You are still forgetting mirages–images which, whether on the surface of the Earth or in space, present such complete illusions to the eyes of travelers. How are these images formed, if you please? By a combination of refractions and reflections that heat generates in the layers of the atmosphere. Well, although we are ignorant of the nature and properties of the ether, as we call it, one thing we do know is that the light of the celestial bodies and the heat of the Sun are transmitted through its substance, since they come to us. Why should they not be subject to optical phenomena analogous to the mirages that we observe within our atmosphere?
“This is what you asked for; this is the mirror in which the images of terrestrial objects may be reflected so that they may live again in your eyes!”
“This hypothesis...” I said, a trifle emotionally.
Monsieur Durand got up and, with an imperious gesture, drew my attention to a closed door set behind him.
“You have defended your position well, Monsieur,” he told me, “and it is good to see feeble human reason struggle so courageously against truth, like a brave little mouse before a cat. Truth–for this is no mere hypothesis; it is a fact, and you shall see it. Would you care to follow me?”
He opened the door, and we found ourselves in a vast laboratory full of strangely-shaped apparatus. A white-haired workman was laboring there, leaning over a kind of bench; he continued his work as if oblivious to our presence.
“This is my laboratory,” Monsieur Durand told me. “It’s here, with the aid of this old workman, that I have constructed the instrument without which everything that I have said to you would still be nothing more than a pure dream.
“You see there a Bunsen battery,66 whose discharge could kill an army of 20,000 men. It’s thanks to this apparatus that I’ve been able to obtain a refractive material of incalculable power.
“This one is an ozone apparatus, that one a Pictet apparatus for compressing gas.67
“After having employed, without success, all known refractive substances, I was eventually led to ask myself whether compressed gases might furnish me with the material I sought. Not having found anything in that direction, I was nearly discouraged, when certain unexplained phenomena turned my attention towards electricity. I set myself on that track ardently.
“It would take too long to explain all my consequent researches, but their result was the discovery that electricity is neither a force, nor a fluid, nor a phenomenon, but a gas, and that this gas, sufficiently compressed under the influence of ozone, may be solidified in a durable form.
“In this state it forms a material a hundred thousand times denser than that of any known substance–and, at the same time, of a transparency infinitely superior to that of the finest flint glass.68 Now, as refraction is nothing but the deviation of a luminous ray through the molecules of the refractive substance, you will understand that electrozone, as I call it, having an infinite number of molecules, can furnish me within lenses of an almost incalculable power.
“The most perfect apparatus that I have so far constructed enlarged the etheric images by a factor of 25 million, but that is insufficient and I hope eventually to obtain a telescope capable of allowing me to read, for example, the inscription that Leonidas had one of his soldiers trace on the rocks of Thermopylae.69 However, that was a long time ago, as you know, and it is a distant prospect.
“Now, Monsieur, prepare yourself for a spectacle such as you have never been able to imagine in your entire life.
“I must, however, warn you that the instrument can only give a direct view, whatever passed during the night or under cover having naturally been unable to produce any external luminous emission. It is the same with everything that took place beyond the bounds of our hemisphere, the luminous rays only being able to propagate within the corresponding part of space.”
Climbing a spiral staircase at the back of the laboratory as he spoke these words, he led me up to a balcony under a sort of rotating dome pierced by several openings. There I saw a cylindrical apparatus mounted on cables and wheels, pointed at the sky.
“This,” said the inventor, “is the Historioscope! It is orientated in the direction of the 15th century; you have only to look through the eyepiece and you will be able to see all of it that you wish.”
The miracle was in front of me! As recognizable in the field of the telescope as actors on the stage of a theatre, men of savage aspect–of gigantic stature with bristling beards, animal skins and frightful weapons, mounted on little horses whose manes hung to the ground–were galloping furiously across a plain, where the smoke and flame of fires were visible in the distance. At their head, crossing ruts, rocks, tree-trunks and crumbled walls by leaps and bounds, a kind of giant with a lion’s muzzle drew them along, brandishing a colossal sword in one hand and a club bristling with six sharpened iron studs in the other.
“Great God!” I cried, recoiling in fear. “What are those people?”
“Ah,” said Monsieur Durand, after having glanced into the telescope, “you’ve made a good start. You’re not clumsy for a debutant. You see there one of the most curious personages of history, at a moment when he is enraged, for it’s not a fortnight since he lost one of his eyes in battle–and to bring his fury to overflowing, his friend John Huss is to be burned alive.”
“What? That’s John Ziska?” 70
“Himself. What a bestial face, eh? Is he handsome thus? And those Bohemians! Well done! And they call themselves men. Don’t tell me that’s a human face! What you see there would bite off the head of a baby prematurely delivered from its mother’s womb! Yes, it’s better than a bullfight.”
