H G Wells, Mind At The End Of Its Tether (1945)

This is Wells's last book; published just before his death in 1946. 'Book' overeggs it, though; this is a pamphlet, frankly embodying in a kind of worn-out brevity of form the exhaustion of its content. I'd not previously read it, although I had heard of its reputation for extreme pessimism. Now I have read it; and what a strange production it is.

The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life-and not simply human life but all self-conscious existance-has been going on since its beginning. If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.

William Golding, who also survived the first half of the 1940s, famously said: 'anybody who lived through the second world war without seeing that man makes evil as a bee honey must be not right in the head.'  Wells treats the same theme without making any actual reference to World War II; and 'evil' is too theological a concept to be of use to him.  But evidently this is a text marked by its time.  Then again, Wells's habit of referring to himself throughout in the third person as 'the writer' gives this oddly disjointed little doomy polemic a weirdly fictive feel.

The question "Is this all?" has troubled countless unsatisfied minds throughout the ages, and, at the end of our tether, as it seems, here it is, still baffling but persistent.

To such discomfited minds the world of our everyday reality is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressful story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves them greatly and yet they feel it is faked. The vast majority of the beholders accept all the conventions of the story, are completely part of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in it and with it. But the skeptical mind says stoutly, "This is delusion".

Golden lads and lasses must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.”

“No,” says this ingrained streak of protest: “there is still something beyond the dust?”

But is there?

There is no reason for saying there is. That skeptical mind may have overrated the thoroughness of its skepticism. As we are now discovering, there was still scope for doubting.

The severer our thinking, the plainer it is that the dust-carts of Time trundle that dust off to the incinerator and there make an end to it.

Hitherto, recurrence has seemed a primary law of life. Night has followed day and day night. But in this strange new phase of existence into which our universe is passing, it becomes evident that events no longer recur. They go on and on to an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which this obstinate urgency of our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but will struggle only until it is altogether overcome.

Our world of self-delusion will admit none of that. It will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown rocky coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chartroom and savages clambering up the sides of the ships to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them. That is the rough outline of the more and more jumbled movie on the screen before us. Mind near exhaustion still makes its final futile movement towards that “way out or round or through the impasse”.

That is the utmost now that mind can do. And this, its last expiring thrust, is to demonstrate that the door closes upon us for evermore.

There is no way out or round or through.

I wonder if the most productive way of reading this strange text would be as a prose poem. The apparent absence of any coherent ordering principle to its depressed ruminations, its lack of argumentative structure, or supporting evidence, or rhetorical bite, could then be seen as aesthetic embodiments of the principle of 'despair': a quasi-Beckettian monologue in which certain themes -- from that last quotation, the cinema screen, the impasse, the antiNietzschean finitude of recurrence -- chime and repeat, in a flattened affectless drone of prose. Wells anticipates Baudrillardian postmodernity, or at least Debord's Société du spectacle, with his trope of the cinema screen as the final, exhausted ground of reality, something given a striking twist by his habit of referring to it as 'the cinema sheet' -- he's thinking, I suppose, of 'the winding sheet':

The cinema sheet stares us in the face. That sheet is the actual fabric of Being. Our loves, our hates, our wars and battles, are no more than a phantasmagoria dancing on that fabric.

I've seen this little book described as nothing more than Wells's sense of his own impending demise projected outwards onto humanity as a whole. I prefer to read it as Wells's sense of the extinction of any absolute, objective or authoritative perspective; a universe without a conceptual pou sto. The closest Wells's imagination comes to supplying such a thing returns him, plangently though glumly, to science fiction:

To a watcher in some remote entirely alien alien cosmos, if we may assume that impossibility, it might well seem that extinction is coming to man like a brutal thunderclap of Halt!

But even that ultimate alienness is an impossibility, it seems. I read this once and it struck me as bathetically muddled and anticlimactic. Then I read it again, and I began to wonder if it isn't an absurdist masterpiece. I'd like to hear it recorded into Krapp's tape machine by Patrick Magee.  Darkly brilliant.