William Stapledon - Last Men in London

I did not attempt to influence Paul’s slowly dawning awareness of self till he was already well advanced in boyhood. One day, after he had been bathing with his favourite schoolfellow, the two boys, naked, wet, gleaming in the sunlight, had a friendly wrangle over a towel. They tugged in opposite directions, shouting and panting. For a moment they stood still, staring into one another’s eyes. Suddenly I re-kindled in Paul all his past groping realizations of the difference between himself and the other, all his past obscure awareness of ‘me’ and ‘you’. I focused, so to speak, the whole vague illumination of this mass of experience upon the present moment. As formerly the pebble and his hand, so now his friend and his own being, impinged upon him with overwhelming reality. It was a reality not alone of visual and tactual form but also of experiencing. Through my manipulation of his imagery he seemed to enter imaginatively into the mind of the other, to have the feel of a different being, in a different body. A fly settled on the other’s neck. Paul felt it tickle, and felt the quick contortion that sent it away. Through the other’s eyes he seemed to see his own intent face, and his own arms lightly pulling at the towel. He began murmuring to himself, ‘I, Paul; you, Dick; I, Dick; you, Paul.’ And through Dick’s eyes he seemed to see his own lips moving. Through Dick’s ears and through his own ears also he heard his own voice. Dick, meanwhile, had seen the sudden intensity of Paul’s expression, and was alarmed. Paul saw, and vividly experienced, Dick’s alarm. They dropped the towel. Paul reached out a hand and felt Dick’s shoulder, as formerly he had felt the pebble. ‘Odd!’ he said, ‘I’ve waked up. I do sometimes. But never quite this way before.’ Dick began to question, but Paul went on, ‘I sort-of woke to be really me. Then I was you. And both of us at once. Did it happen to you too?’ Dick shook his head, very perplexed. Then came the headache. Paul dropped, and lay whimpering, with his hands over his eyes.

My next experiment was performed during a violent quarrel between Paul and Dick. Paul had spent a free afternoon making a boat. He was hollowing it with a gouge borrowed from Dick. Dick arrived to demand the gouge, which was long overdue, and was needed for hollowing his own boat. Paul, intent on his work and eager to finish it before tea, refused to surrender the tool. They wrangled, while Paul carried on his work. Dick tried to stop him. At this moment I forced on Paul a vivid apprehension of the other boy, and of his craving to have his tool, and of his rage against Paul. Paul stopped working. Once more he seemed for a moment to be Dick, and to see his own ugly scowl through Dick’s eyes. For a moment Paul hung paralysed in a mental conflict. Then suddenly he jabbed Dick’s hand with the gouge. Both boys screamed with Dick’s pain. Paul rushed toward the door, crying, ‘Beast, get out of me, you taste horrid.’ Before he reached the door he vomited. Then he fled, yelling. He carried off the gouge.

This reaction of Paul’s was very typical of his species. His brief insight into the other’s point of view merely filled him with resentment. Typical also was his subsequent remorse, which tortured him during his period of illness after this experiment. Dick had been thoroughly frightened. It seemed to him that Paul had gone mad.

In time, however, the friendship was restored, and even deepened; for Paul now treated Dick with a gentleness and understanding beyond his years. Occasionally I induced in him the more vivid apprehension of his friend and himself, but I carefully refrained from doing so when their interests were violently opposed.

In this way I produced in Paul a self-insight and insight into others which is very unusual in your species. His rare abnormal experiences now coloured his whole life, and sowed in him the seed of a lifelong conflict between the behaviour natural to his kind and the behaviour which his enhanced insight demanded. When he found himself forced to choose between the two, he almost always acted in the baser way, though afterwards he was bitterly remorseful. Once or twice, however, things turned out differently. I will give one example.

Paul was one of those timid boys who is a constant temptation to the bully. When any bullying was afoot in which Paul himself was not involved, he always took care not to interfere. Sometimes he would actually try to ingratiate himself with the stronger party. One winter day at school, when Paul and a few others of his form were supposed to be doing their’ preparation’, the arch bully of the form began tormenting a little Jew whom Paul intensely disliked. The smaller boys, with Paul among them, looked on, applauding now and then with anxious giggles. I chose this moment for an experiment. With dismay Paul felt his cursed imagination beginning to work. He tried to bury himself in his French exercise, but vainly. Do what he would, he could not help entering imaginatively into ‘that beastly little Jew’. Then he started being not only the Jew but the bully also. He imagined the big lout feeling the helpless self-disgust which he himself had felt in his one experiment in the art of bullying. I worked up this imagination till he really apprehended the mind of the bully far better than the bully himself. He realized vividly the drowsy, fumbling, vaguely distressed and frightened life that was going on in that hulk of flesh, and was disguised even from itself by the pose of braggartism. Suddenly Paul said aloud in a clear but dreamy voice, ‘Chuck it, Williams, you’re hurting yourself.’ There was a sudden silence of amazement. Paul, terrified at his own voice, bowed over his French book. The bully remarked, ‘Your turn next’, and then applied himself once more to his victim, who squealed. Paul rose, crossed the floor, laid a hand on the bully’s shoulder, and was sent crashing into the hearth. He sat for a moment among the cinders listening to the general laugh. Then slowly he rose, and slowly surveyed his grinning fellow-mortals. Williams gave an extra twist to the Jew’s arm, and there followed a yell, Paul, saying quietly, ‘Williams, you’ve got to stop’, put his own left hand into the fire and picked out a large completely redhot coal. Ignoring the pain and the smell of his burning flesh, he went over to Williams and said, ‘Now, clear out or I’ll brand you,’ Someone tried to seize Paul’s arm, He used his coal with effect, so that the other retired, Then he rushed at Williams, The bully fled. I felt Paul’s eyebrows rise and his lips twist in a whimsical smile, He stood dreaming for a moment, then restored the still faintly glowing coal to its place in the fire, Suddenly he caught sight of the charred and smoking mess that was his hand. All along he had been aware of the pain, but he had calmly ignored it. But now that the incident was completed, ignoring was impossible. His strange exaltation vanished. He gave one sharp scream, half for pain, half for surprise, and then fainted. Paul’s hand recovered within a few weeks, though of course it remained scarred for ever. Paul’s mind was more deeply affected. He was terrified about himself. He felt that he had been possessed, and he dreaded being let in for even worse scrapes in the future. All the same, he was rather proud of himself, and half-wished he could be like that always.

During his schooldays Paul suffered more than the normal growing pains, for his mind was shooting upward in response not only to normal but to abnormal influences. He was outgrowing not only toys and childish interests; he was outgrowing the world which school life imposed upon him, Like a crab that has become too big for its shell and must struggle out of it, Paul was now too big for his world. It had cracked under the stress of his vital movement, and he was in the act of issuing from it in a soft vulnerable, but flexible and expansible covering, which some day would harden into a new and ampler dwelling-place.