“On Anything,” Hilaire Belloc
Constable & Co., 1910

“The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. He can conceive, as a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.

All these things Dunoyer’s careful book upon two men of the Revolutionary Tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense research which dignifies the modern French School of History, has suggested to my mind.

Now, whenever I read of the Revolution, in general or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right. Not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. And even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. But what that method may be there is no space to discuss here.”

My Comment:

Belloc is less familiar to me than Chesterton, but it’s an ignorance I mean to remedy swiftly. I encountered him during childhood through his nonsense rhymes and modeled an early unpublished collection of light verse on them. I always meant to get around to reading more of him.

It’s one of the horrid things about governments that we have to spend so much time figuring out what new imposition they mean to levy on us that we have no time left over for things we actually enjoy. Some days I wonder if we wouldn’t be wiser to simply ignore what’s going on and live “underground,” hiding as much of our lives as we can from the powers that be.

The Belloc passage I posted expresses a conundrum that often troubles me and surfaced in an article I posted a while ago by Naomi Wolf, in which she compares the US government to the Nazis.  Joey Kurtzman correctly called this historically inaccurate. I concurred with Kurtzman, but still agreed that Wolf had said something “true,” even if partially inaccurate.

This I take to be the substance of what Belloc is saying. Our predictions are always intensely colored by the particular time in which we live and thus are  always suspect. But at moments of crisis – revolutionary moments – we can nonetheless correctly predict the direction of the future, not because of any perspective lent to us by the time in which we live, but because of something outside time, some truth beyond particularity. That is what seizes us and speaks through us…

PS: I corrected the title of this post, from “Hilaire Belloc on the effect of time” to “Hilaire Belloc on prophecy and time” for the sake of clarity.