{"id":152754,"date":"2021-05-26T10:50:23","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T14:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152754"},"modified":"2021-05-26T10:50:23","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T14:50:23","slug":"to-witness-the-end-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/05\/26\/to-witness-the-end-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"To Witness the End of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Podgrad pri Vranskem Castle, 1830. Kaiser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Terry Pratchett\u2019s 1988 summary of The House on the Border\u00adland <\/em>begins: \u201cMan buys House. House attacked Nightly by Horrible Swine Things from Hole in Garden. Man Fights Back with Determination and Lack of Imagination of Political Proportions.\u201d It ends: \u201cThe journey to the Central Suns sold me infinity.\u201d Infinity is a rather lofty reward for persevering through a battle with pig-men. But Pratchett was right. Wil\u00adliam Hope Hodgson\u2019s novel, published in 1908 (but likely writ\u00adten in 1904) is one of the most startling accounts of infinity that I\u2019ve ever read.<\/p>\n

The novel came to me serendipitously: my friend Mike stumbled across it while googling some Dungeons & Dragons thing called \u201cInto the Borderlands.\u201d He read the book, loved it, and passed it on to me. I read it with no knowledge of who Hodg\u00adson was or what I was getting into. As an immigrant, I often experience the delight of belated discovery: Frederick Douglass, Star Wars<\/em>, Lolita<\/em>. But with Hodgson, I\u2019m not alone. After his death in Ypres at age forty-one, Hodgson was mostly forgot\u00adten until a brief\u2014and apparently unsuccessful\u2014revival in the thirties. When fiction reappears after a spell of obscurity, we often say it was before its time. To me, The House on the Borderland<\/em> is untimely in another, more enthralling way: it undoes time. It begins conventionally enough. The narrator (a figure for the author) and his friend decide to take a fishing trip to \u201ca tiny hamlet called Kraighten\u201d in the west of Ireland\u2014an unusual place for a vacation, but a classic frame for a Gothic tale all the same. One day, the two men go exploring. Tracking a strange spray of water shooting up above the canopy, they find them\u00adselves in a kind of jungly lowland with a pit in the middle of it. Jutting into this pit is a protruding rock, at the tip of which sits the ruins of an old house. In the rubble, they find a half-destroyed book\u2014a diary. Smoking their pipes at camp that night, \u201cHodgson\u201d reads it aloud.<\/p>\n

The entries feel at first like a haunted-house story, with echoes of Edgar Allan Poe: a rambling old mansion bought by folks from out of town, a canine companion named Pepper who tugs at our heartstrings, intimations of a long-lost love, and a hero unaccountably drawn to investigate holes in the ground. But then the diarist recounts a strange vision of spinning out into the universe and descending upon an unearthly plain ringed with mountains, a black sun limned by a ring of fire hovering over it. In the middle of the amphitheater, he sees what appears to be a replica of the house in which he lives on Earth\u2014this one, though, has an eerie, green glow. In the mountains above, he makes out the giant shapes of ancient gods\u2014Kali, Set\u2014and a hideous beast that moves \u201cwith a curi\u00adous lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appear\u00adance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine.\u201d <\/p>\n

This creepy vision turns out to be prophetic. Soon the novel tells the strange tale of a battle between the diarist and a horde of these pig-men, of smaller size but fleshier and more hor\u00adrific presence than the vision. Hodgson ingeniously weaves together the horror of Circe turning Odysseus\u2019s men into pigs, the biblical overtones of demon-possessed swine, and the pig-human hybrids of H. G. Wells\u2019s Island of Dr.\u00a0Moreau<\/em>. Indeed, the prose begins to resemble something out of Wells, as a science-minded explorer tries to discern the line between the unnatural and the supernatural. The narrator\u2019s experiments are exaggeratedly methodical, which of course makes us skeptical of him. When the horde vanishes without a trace, his sister seems afraid of him<\/em> and makes no mention of the pig-men. Later, he measures a subterranean pit in the cellars of the house by placing candles around its perimeter: \u201cAlthough they showed me nothing that I wanted to see; yet the contrast they afforded to the heavy darkness, pleased me, curiously. It was as though fifteen tiny stars shone through the subterranean night.\u201d His efforts to map space seem futile or, rather, aesthetic. There\u2019s a tinge of the sublime horror of weird architecture and eldritch space to all of this. In effect, this metaphor, which likens the abyssal candelabra to stars, converts an obsession with space into an obsession with time.<\/p>\n

The narrator is reading (\u201ccuriously enough\u201d) the Bible when he has another vision. It begins with a sound: \u201cA faint and dis\u00adtant, whirring buzz, that grew rapidly into a far, muffled scream\u00ading. It reminded me, in a queer, gigantic way, of the noise that a clock makes, when the catch is released, and it is allowed to run down.\u201d But the clock in the study is in fact speeding up, the minute hand \u201cmoving \u2019round the dial, faster than an ordinary second-hand,\u201d the hour hand moving \u201cquickly from space to space.\u201d The narrator looks out the window. What follows\u2014a kind of ekphrasis of time-lapse film\u2014is astonishing. While The Time Machine<\/em> (1895) also describes time sped up, to my mind, Hodgson\u2019s language and imagery far surpass Wells\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Surrounded by the \u201cblur\u201d of \u201cworld-noise,\u201d the narrator watches the sun go from orb to arc to streak to flicker to quiver of light. He sees clouds \u201cscampering\u201d and \u201cwhisking\u201d across the sky; the \u201cstealthy, writhing creep of the shadows of the wind-stirred trees\u201d; and when winter comes, \u201ca sweat of snow\u201d that abruptly comes and goes, \u201cas though an invisible giant \u2018flitted\u2019 a white sheet off and on the earth.\u201d He sees \u201ca heavy, everlasting rolling, a vast, seamless sky of grey clouds\u2014a cloud-sky that would have seemed motionless, through all the length of an ordinary earth-day.\u201d He grows used to \u201cthe vision of the swiftly leaping sun, and nights that came and went like shadows.\u201d The advancing edge of a black thundercloud flaps \u201clike a monstrous black cloth in the heaven, twirling and undulating rapidly.\u201d He catches \u201cglimpses of a ghostly track of fire that swayed thin and darkly towards the sun-stream \u2026 it was the scarcely visible moon-stream.\u201d Poor Pepper turns to dust. His own face has grown old in the looking glass. Eventually, he sees a long, rounded shape under the \u201caeon-carpet of sleep\u00ading dust\u201d in the room\u2014his corpse. It has been \u201cyears\u2014and years.\u201d He has become \u201ca bodiless thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point, the novel gets even weirder, merging spiritual and scientific language into a grand, universal theory of ghosts, angels, demons, heaven, hell, as well as planetary orbits and star deaths. Our ghostly narrator repeatedly hints that he has reached the end of time\u2014yet time presses on. He drifts, with\u00adout will, into unknown dimensions via large bubbles with human faces locked within them. Eventually, he watches as his house on the borderland\u2014the borderland between what and what exactly?\u2014is overrun with pig-men, set aflame as the Earth flies into the sun, and then rises again in the phospho\u00adrescent incarnation of the house from his first vision. He is borne toward it, steps inside, and wakes in his study. All is well, it was just a dream \u2026 except that poor Pepper is still a heap of dust.<\/p>\n

The House on the Borderland <\/em>closes with the vengeance and the patness of genre fiction. Pig-men, of a sort, return. The narrator gets another dog, who is also sacrificed to plot. H.\u00a0P. Lovecraft (of all people) noted a touch of sentimentality to the novel, too. But I have never read a more remarkable account of time beyond a human scale. This account feels especially worth revisiting now, when time poses a new problem for humans: we\u2019re running out of it. Or it\u2019s running out of us\u2014we are the grains of sand falling through the thin neck of years left before we reach three degrees too far.<\/p>\n

How can we conceive of the time of climate change, the time of planetary death? The House on the Borderland<\/em> tried to conceive of exactly this a century ago. Yes, the narrator\u2019s acts are fruitless. He gets haplessly carted about the universe to witness the end of time, which never really ends, is always at the edge, nearing an asymptote, on the borderland. Sure, his diary breaks off midspeech and Hodgson slams the frame story shut with an unsatisfying clunk. Still, I urge you to dwell in The House on the Borderland<\/em>, to explore both its means\u2014its ragged form and otherworldly atmosphere\u2014and its ends: the sublimity and humility of recognizing just how uneasily we sit within the endless spinning of time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University and the author of <\/em>Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014),\u00a0<\/em>The Old Drift: A Novel (2019), and\u00a0<\/em>Stranger Faces (2020).<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>B-Side Books:\u00a0Essays on Forgotten Favorites<\/a>, edited by John Plotz. Copyright \u00a9 2021 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. B-Sides\u2014a celebration of great books that time forgot\u2014is also a series at <\/em>Public Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Namwali Serpell on the forgotten timelessness and otherworldly atmosphere of Wil\u00adliam Hope Hodgson\u2019s novel \u2018The House on the Borderland.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2066,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-152754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTo Witness the End of Time by Namwali Serpell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Namwali Serpell on the forgotten timelessness and otherworldly atmosphere of Wil\u00adliam Hope Hodgson\u2019s novel \u2018The House on the Borderland.\u2019\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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