Story of shanda sharer

Apologies for the length of this post in advance !
I (25M) have just been on holiday with my equally gay best friend (26M) to San Francisco. This is the latest of many holidays we have been very fortunate to go on with each other in our 5 years of friendship. We originally met on Tinder at university and have had an on again off again sort of relationship since, mostly pursued by myself. He was the keener one of the two until I had to move abroad to continue my studies, but we have kept in touch daily ever since. I moved back to the city we both live in two years ago, and we see each other 2 - 3 evenings a week, always alone. However, I had learned to not start anything in case of rejection, so any kind of move over the past few years (kissing, oral, sex, dates) have always been initiated by him.
Four years ago, when I had just moved to Italy for my degree, he came to visit me in Turin. We had a pretty wild first night, but it was the first time I ever told him that I loved him. I truly meant it, moving to a different country made me miss him more than I could ever imagine. Short story, he said it back, then said he needed to go for a walk to get some fresh air. It was the middle of August in Italy, so I didn't think twice of it - it was boiling in the AC-less room we'd spent the last couple of hours having fun. The next morning, I was upset because I then saw a bunch of Grindr notifications going off on his phone, and asked him if he had met someone last night. He categorically denied it and said I was paranoid and that this was ruining our time together.
Fast-forward to Saturday night. We're sitting in a restaurant and he accidentally let it slip that he had indeed met someone that night. I, upset, left the restaurant after asking for an apology for him lying. He wouldn't and said I was being melodramatic over something that happened four years ago. I felt lied to all over again and gaslit, but kept it together because we still had a couple of days to go and I did not want to cause a scene half way across the globe.
I'm not usually much of a sharer, but I want to know if I was overreacting and if so, why people thought so. I do not see his perspective and he is not much of a communicator, so I come to Reddit. I'd appreciate your thoughts and am happy to elaborate - thanks all!

Hi folks,
Wondering if any generous souls might be willing to give me their two cents on two layouts I did this morning. The relevant background here (confirmed with another reading) is that I'm currently part of a destruction dynamic going on with my current employer (whom I'm trying to leave asap) and I believe that business is going under. Approx. six months ago, I did some readings which seemingly indicated a destruction dynamic and I asked for clarification here. Some kind people interpreted the spreads as saying to lay low for a while, which I've been doing until very recently when I've felt called to do some divination.
For what its worth, based on the water of life card appearing frequently, it seems I'm on my correct path and healing, if that helps as additional context.
In a yes/no reading from the Tarot Skills for the 21st century:
"Is there an available curriculum of magical learning which would provide more net benefit to my life than Quareia?" (what I was trying to get at was whether, overall, there was a program that might be a better fit - I haven't come across it and remain very interest in Quareia and generally a big fan of JMC).
Answer:

1. What the question is about: Magical Death
   
2. The relevant past: Underworld
   
3. Difficulties to be overcome: Dreams
   
4. Help you are given: Partnership
   
5. The future outcome/what the answer will lead to: Hidden Knowledge
   
6. The answer: Ghost
   

I had and have no idea how to read the Ghost here as an answer. I believe from other divination that the destructive dynamic going on at work (of which I'm seemingly a necessary part) is underworld related (which may be a duh for some folks, apologies, but I know nothing).
So because I found this really confusing, I did a clarifying reading with the tree of life layout used in the same book, and asked: "Is the Ghost card in the prior reading telling me there is a spirit of a dead person around me or the situation?"

1. What the story is about: Stargazers
   
2. Positive or giving aspect forming the story: Fate Weavers
   
3. What is hidden or past that has bearing on the story: Leadership
   
4. What is necessary for the story to develop: Unraveller
   
5. What is withheld from the story or being taken away: East Gate
   
6. The pivotal aspect of the story: Inner Desert
   
7. What needs discipline or limiting for success: True Justice
   
8. What needs relaxing to flow: Service
   
9. The reason or dynamic behind the answer: Separation
   
10. The answer: Voice of untruth
    

I read the answer here via the voice of untruth as being "No, not the spirit of a dead person." I assume the separation dynamics have to do with separating from my employment, and that perhaps service is being used as a substitute for "work" meaning relax about work or don't do as much, but no idea. Leadership, I assume refers to my past actions. But this left me with no sense of the answer to my original question.
I've found the whole thing really confusing. If you've made it this far with me, I really appreciate you. To help figure out what these other readings mean, I did the Mystagogus layout, which read as follows. I don't ask that anyone try to interpret this for me, but merely provide it for context on the other readings.
EDIT: the question asked (and sorry for omitting it previously) was “show me where I am on my magical path right now.”
1. Progenitor: what the story is about
a. Water Of Life: soul nourishment, sacred healing, physical healing, divine love, regeneration, working with water energy
2. Endurance: what must be overcome for success/growth
a. Sacred Place: holy place, sacred space, place of divine presence, clean, balanced, safe place, special person, nature power spot
3. Unraveling: what must be let go of or loosened up, or what is falling away
a. South Gate: south, future, fire, creative fire, volatile energy, yes, positive
4. Partnership: what you are closely interacting with or what is having a direct influence
a. Destruction: loss, destruction, dangerous imbalance, destructive behavior, make a major change, painful rebalancing, catastrophe, natural disaster, get out of the way.
5. Hearth: home, family, tribe
a. Silence: be silent, do not act, you do not need to know, do not ask, think before speaking, secrets and keeping secrets
6. West Gate: what is now fading into the past but can return
a. Load sharer: sharing a burden, upholding others, caretaking, holding a magical working, protecting someone, helping, hard work, enabling someone
7. North Gate: what is now long past and will not return, but has relevance
a. Harvester: death, change, liberation, closing, limited time, letting go, end of a fate cycle, loss of control that destroys.
8. Fate weavers: the current individual’s fate pattern that is active
a. West Gate: leaving, coming to an end, very recent past, slowing down, aging, direction of west, probably not, no longer viable
9. The Path: what is moving forward, active and positive
a. Companions: working creature companion, tend to creatures, augury, an important animal or bird, an animal is the key
10. The Binder: what is withheld, is not active, nor should be
a. Creating: creating, painting, writing, sacred art, consecrated art, sacred words, creative service, music, drama, the creative act
11. The gift: help that comes to the situation
a. Hidden Knowledge: unseen, secret, hidden, beyond understanding, hidden potential, unknown, depths, unseen water, incubation of great learning, despair before emerging, dark night of the soul
12. Underworld: The adversary of the situation
a. The Path: important fate path, trust, yes, correct, way ahead, action, move forward
13. Dreams: what is happening in sleep and dreams, can also be a position of visionary work
a. Progenitor: Idea forming, divine presence, preconception, before dawn
14. Inner Worlds: What is flowing to the situation from the innespirit worlds
a. Unraveller: falling apart, falling away, loosening, breaking up slowly, crumbling, unwinding.
15. Daimon: advice offered on what actions are needed for success
a. Perception: pay attention, a sign, warning, exposing hidden information, precognition, prophecy, awareness, truth, understanding the truth, seeing what others do not see, seeing what is veiled.
16. Danger: what is dangerous and can inhibit or stop progress
a. Purification: ritual cleansing, purify, consecreate, bathe, tidy up, clean space, make sacred
17. East Gate: Short term future, the path ahead
a. Splendor: yes, success, achievement, joy, beauty, respect, harmony
18. South Gate: What will come to be in the longer term future as a result of the current situation
a. Secret Commonwealth: land being, faery, nature spirit, unpredictable person or situation, make no promises, strangeness, a need for integrity in the face of unfairness
I took a lot of comfort in this reading because it seems like I'm at least on a positive path even in the midst of a destructive tide or dynamic with my company. I read some of this as "stay muddy to be camouflaged, don't cleanse yourself or your home overmuch."
Would really appreciate any thoughts or insight of parts or the whole of this.
Thanks all, and hope everyone is safe and healthy.

Penguins: Survivor Canada is here! 16 Castaways will assort themselves into two tribes, Jouer and Dernier, and will battle it out for the prize of 1 million dollars!
Welcome back to the BrantSteele series with no effort whatsoever put into it, I'm penguin and this is Penguins: Survivor Canada!
https://brantsteele.com/survivo05/r.php?c=kQCS4XhP
Lets meet our castaways!
the Jouer tribe:
Craig Johnston, 27, Axe Thrower by u/swoldow
Jordan "Jojo" Lanston, 18, Blogger by u/AshZomboy
June Lau, 56, Hotel Receptionist by u/Twig7665
Leonardo "Leo" Costa, 36, Environmental Scientist by u/Nahuelfire39
Mercedes "Merces" Lopez, 41, Grandma of 3 by u/survivorgoldenboy
Randy Marton, Rancher by u/SilverOwl24 (no age provided)
Viktor "Zeystev" Zeystev, 37, Lawyer by u/swoldow
Walter Bloo, 48, Personal Trainer by u/AshZomboy
Dernier Tribe:
Amanda Harker, Vegetarian Chef by u/SilverOwl24 (no age provided)
Andre Johnson, 43, Teacher by u/xXiDamXx
Emilly Ford, 26, Private Detective, by u/survivorgoldenboy
Ignacio "Nacio" Ortega, 22, Ride Sharer by u/Twig7665
Joo-Won Ju, 27, Waitress by u/Nahuelfire39
Joshua "Josh" Samson, 37, Motivational Vlogger by u/Twig7665
LaQuanna Thomas, 27, Movie Theater Popcorn Vendor by u/swoldow
Trisha "Trish" Brown, 30, Novelist, by u/ToastieGreep
Winner: Jordan "Jojo" Lanston
Runner-Up: Randy Marton
Fan Favorite (Brantsteele): LaQuanna Thomas
Fan Favorite (My Choice): Andre Johnson
Thoughts: Great season. I didn't like that alot of the votes were boring unanimous ones (maybe I'm just spoiled from the insane votes in Japan lol) but still a great season overall. Jojo and Randy's insane underdog run was insane to watch! After Craig was gone they had to overcome a 2-5 deficit and pulled it off! Amazing work from Jojo and Randy. LaQuanna being eliminated with 0 votes against her do to being rocked out is sooo unfortunate. Zeystev was a great pre-merge villain, and Josh was a great merge villain. What an underdog story!
Previous Seasons:
Borneo
Australia
India
Japan

Multiple people? Kissing? Life story? Future plans? Home visits? Friends/family introduction?
I’ve never actually dated! I was always in a relationship or friends with benefits scenario. I have no clue how to do it and where to start lol. I’m an over-sharer. I hear that’s a huge no no in the dating scene. Anyone out there in their late 30’s + older who has gotten the hang of it?

I was shocked to hear Paul testify that Adam wasnt G's biological Dad. That revelation has left me confused ever since I initially heard it, and has me curious about so many things I hope someone can answer! Such as:
Who is G's biological Father then?
Why did G have Adam's last name if he wasn't his biological Father? It has to be because he and Shanda are married, obviously, right? That's how the law works. He must have signed his birth certificate and just claimed him as his own.
So correct me if I'm wrong here- but weren't Shanda and Adam either married (or together at least) for 7 years? And G was around that same age.
Was she already pregnant when she got with Adam? Or did she cheat and needed a cover story?
Or is the that rumor substantiated about them both seeking out a donor for in-vitro after she got her reversal of her tied tubes? (Which I think is a complete lie and 99% unlikely.)
I'm sorry, but if this chick SPENT MONEY on a tied-tube "reversal" so she could SPEND MONEY on in-vitro rounds for a baby WHILE OWING CHILD SUPPORT for several other kids... she's even worse than I can even fathom!
I just dont believe the tube reversal story. So what IS the truth? Am I wrong for not believing that? Is G really a "miracle baby."?
I'm sorry if this has been discussed but i did some searching and i couldnt find a direct answer so thanks for any clarification.

My wife and I, both 30, recently had a newborn and moved into a new house just under a year ago. On one side, we have a middle-aged woman living with her husband and daughter. On the other side, there’s a middle-aged woman who lived with her elderly mother until her mother passed away five months ago. We’ve tried to be polite and friendly neighbors, but things have gotten a bit complicated.
The Situation
Neighbor #1: The Chatterbox Family
The woman with the family on one side is very friendly—perhaps too friendly. Every time we step outside, she comes out to talk to us. Our other neighbor (the one with her elderly mother) even warned us that she’s a chatterbox who won’t leave us alone. To solve this, we decided to build a fence and pay for it ourselves. We have two dogs that we let in and out frequently, so the fence also helps with that. Problem solved, right?
Neighbor #2: The Over-Sharer
On the other side, we have the woman who used to live with her elderly mother. She also has a 20-something-year-old son who doesn’t live with her. Initially, I thought she had more self-awareness, but I was wrong. She started talking to me every time she came outside, sharing personal stories. These conversations are mostly one-sided, and I get caught in long talks when all I want to do is relax in my backyard or let my dogs out.
After her mother passed away and she sold the house, she began showing up at our door unannounced. She even came in, took off her shoes, and gave my wife a mothers day gift in the middle of a workday—without an invitation. Since selling the house, she’s been offering us old stuff that we don’t really want or need, which makes us think she might be a bit of a hoarder. We saw the interior of her house once, and it seemed cluttered and hoarder-like. She keeps mentioning that she wants us to visit her new apartment, and I’m worried she’ll continue showing up unannounced even after she moves.
Our Dilemma
We appreciate everyone trying to be nice, but it’s becoming too much. We aren’t looking for more relationships of this type. We both have large families, parents, and lots of other relationship obligations. We need our space, especially with a newborn at home. It’s hard to manage all these interactions without feeling overwhelmed.
We understand that our neighbor's mother died and she might be feeling lonely, but she has a son and we aren’t her family. We want to set clear boundaries without being rude. We appreciate friendly neighbors, but we also need our space.
AITA for wanting to set these boundaries and feeling this way?

Hello everyone, First time posting on Reddit, never thought I would especially about this topic, but I need any advice / or life experiences from others. Quick preamble; my mother is in depression, and the loneliness is what seems to trouble her the most. But I have no about how to help her. This topic has been probably posted many times but I couldn't find one that applies to my situation. So below I try to set the scene to whoever is ready to have a bit of reading;
I (M31) am originally from France. My parents had a rough mariage and ended up divorcing almost 15y ago. But this didn't end well and my mother lost everything, the house they built, savings, friends etc. we moved overnight and never went back to this place. So this was a big trauma for her. The divorce procedure lasted a few years which didn't help, and deepened the trauma which led to the depression. She gave up an important job opportunity because my sister didn't care about living anymore. In the end, while my siblings and I were living with her, she was holding the fort.
After a few years my siblings and I started to move from home to start our own life, and we saw that this was an even bigger trauma for our mother. She's always dreamed of the perfect family, with children coming every weekend, doing things together etc. But I think because her mission was to protect us, once we were fully independent she lost her purpose in life.
Because of the divorce, she was struggling financially but always making it work. And always compared herself to others, knowing that she deserved what others were living too, being able to go on vacation, retire and so on. In addition, her family had some drama as well, and again, her vision of what family should be, is sharered. She closed herself more and more, negativity all the time, confrontational, not feeling any emotion really, and her few friends most likely got tired of this. But my mother keep thinking that if people don't reach out to her, why would she. So the feeling of loneliness got prevalent.
I moved to the USA since 2020, right before Covid, and live there since then. She was supportive but deep inside I'm certain this was not what she desired (shes a mother after all). Then Covid hit, restrictions were quite severe in France, and I could I travel to France to visit. Then issues with Visa, preventing easy visits. I try to go once a year now. I wish she would come but fear of flying seems too strong. She visited once, but instead of being happy, because being together was supposed to be her goal to be happy, but she was in her depression and couldn't feel anything. I was lost. And she was blunt saying that I decided to move, while all the families around her are living nearby to their children, or easy to travel to. And she is not accepting/acknowledging that she has been in depression for almost 15y now. There are a lot more layers to this story but I don't want to write a book for now...
I am now feeling extreme guilt that I moved so far away. Guilty that my mother feels this way and doesn't have any purpose in life anymore. And feeling guilty that my sister, who lives an hour away from her, has to deal with this situation. When our mother is in her depression phase, like this week, she doesn't reply to messages, or she mentions that she can't stand her loneliness any longer. But whatever options I provide, is never the solution. So she stays home, in bed for several days. Not going outside to not see people and be envious of families etc.
THANK YOU, if you read through this all, and I appreciate you took some of your time. Has anyone been in this situation? I feel helpless, and extremely guilty. I don't know what to reply anymore, and this situation makes me question my life choices. I'm constantly thinking about how I could help, say, ... And it's bringing me down. How do you cope with family members in this situation? Specifically as someone who lives across the globe away from your family. What to say? What to do? How do you cope with guilt? Any advice, personal experience, or any opinion is welcome. I'm desperate for any point of view which would help me think more about all this.
Looking forward to reading any comment. I appreciate you taking some of your time for this post.

Hello everyone, First time posting on Reddit, never thought I would especially about this topic, but I need any advice / or life experiences from anyone.
Quick preamble; my mother is in depression, and the loneliness is what seems to trouble her the most. But I have no about how to help her. This topic has been probably posted many times but I couldn't find one that applies to my situation. So below I try to set the scene to whoever is ready to have a bit of reading;
I (M31) am originally from France. My parents had a rough mariage and ended up divorcing almost 15y ago. But this didn't end well and my mother lost everything, the house they built, savings, friends etc. we moved overnight and never went back to this place. So this was a big trauma for her. The divorce procedure lasted a few years which didn't help, and deepened the trauma which led to the depression. She gave up an important job opportunity because my sister didn't care about living anymore. In the end, while my siblings and I were living with her, she was holding the fort.
After a few years my siblings and I started to move from home to start our own life, and we saw that this was an even bigger trauma for our mother. She's always dreamed of the perfect family, with children coming every weekend, doing things together etc. But I think because her mission was to protect us, once we were fully independent she lost her purpose in life.
Because of the divorce, she was struggling financially but always making it work. And always compared herself to others, knowing that she deserved what others were living too, being able to go on vacation, retire and so on. In addition, her family had some drama as well, and again, her vision of what family should be, is sharered. She closed herself more and more, negativity all the time, confrontational, not feeling any emotion really, and her few friends most likely got tired of this. But my mother keep thinking that if people don't reach out to her, why would she. So the feeling of loneliness got prevalent.
I moved to the USA since 2020, right before Covid, and live there since then. She was supportive but deep inside I'm certain this was not what she desired (shes a mother after all). Then Covid hit, restrictions were quite severe in France, and I could I travel to France to visit. Then issues with Visa, preventing easy visits. I try to go once a year now. I wish she would come but fear of flying seems too strong. She visited once, but instead of being happy, because being together was supposed to be her goal to be happy, but she was in her depression and couldn't feel anything. I was lost. And she was blunt saying that I decided to move, while all the families around her are living nearby to their children, or easy to travel to. And she is not accepting/acknowledging that she has been in depression for almost 15y now. There are a lot more layers to this story but I don't want to write a book for now...
I am now feeling extreme guilt that I moved so far away. Guilty that my mother feels this way and doesn't have any purpose in life anymore. And feeling guilty that my sister, who lives an hour away from her, has to deal with this situation. When our mother is in her depression phase, like this week, she doesn't reply to messages, or she mentions that she can't stand her loneliness any longer. But whatever options I provide, is never the solution. So she stays home, in bed for several days. Not going outside to not see people and be envious of families etc.
THANK YOU, if you read through this all, and I appreciate you took some of your time. Has anyone been in this situation? I feel helpless, and extremely guilty. I don't know what to reply anymore, and this situation makes me question my life choices. I'm constantly thinking about how I could help, say, ... And it's bringing me down. How do you cope with family members in this situation? Specifically as someone who lives across the globe away from your family. What to say? What to do? How do you cope with guilt? Any advice, personal experience, or any opinion is welcome. I'm desperate for any point of view which would help me think more about all this.
Looking forward to reading any comment. I appreciate you taking some of your time reading this post.

https://youtu.be/3vZzWjaC3EE
This video covers the audio transcript captured from Shanda Vander Ark's cameras on July 3 and 4, 2022. Timothy Ferguson died on July 6, early in the morning hours. The verbal abuse he endured here is only part of a much larger, more horrific story, but it's important to note (again) that both Shanda and Paul Ferguson were verbally as well as physically abusive, independent of each other.
(Thanks to /uPixiegirls1102 for pointing out pages in the Muskegon Incident Report that I had missed.)

I would love to see what anyone thinks about the ideas presented in the story, if anyone has other interpretations or agrees with mine.
The stories of H.G.Wells are rich and captivating worlds where he makes the unfathomable seem plausible. Wells uses concepts from the sciences readily in his writing as a base of reality. His protagonists tend to be inquisitive types that posit questions about the state of the world, often giving and testing their hypotheses along a surreal adventure. In The Time Machine our protagonist is simply and ambiguously labeled the Time Traveler. He has just transformed physics forever by creating a vehicle that can fold and traverse spacetime. Now he aims to demonstrate to his civilized friends his unbelievable achievement. In a way this demonstration is both a primer for them and a reassurance for himself that he is not in a fantasy.

• “Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

This is a question the Time Traveler asks his dinner party audience in order to introduce the concept of Time as the 4th dimension. He claims you need “duration” for anything to truly exist. If a cube only exists for an imperceptible instant then did it really exist? It’s a question that provokes a bunch of thoughts. How long is an instant? If an instant is measurable then the cube did exist for a time, no? But without the evidence of creation or decay of the cube how can we be certain that it existed? This question is a seemingly untestable hypothetical.

• “But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

The idea of memories being a way to time travel brings into thought a swell of philosophy. Is time really just a figment of consciousness. A way for humans to make sense of the world, to traverse it, to learn from it. Many scientists seem to think so (1). A mind altering realization that I can’t truly grasp fully. But what if in a way thinking of time as just a construct of the mind might reveal an ultimate interpretation of this extraordinary tale that’s being told. I’m sure it’s read that way by some.
Also, ‘if ever a creature could figure out time travel it’s humans’, believes the Time Traveler. His distinction between “civilized” man and a “savage” is problematic to say the least, but we’ll revisit that later because it has major bearing on how our protagonist sees the world.
Distinguishing the 4th dimension of Time as another measure of existence (like the 3 Euclidian measures of height, length and width) is a way for the reader, and the dinner party audience, to conceptualize it as a plane that we can move along. Today scientists still haven’t cracked the code of time travel and some contest Time being the 4th dimension at all. (2)(3)

• “The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated— was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction-possibly a far-reaching explosion-would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine”

Here the Time Traveler is describing his first, future time warp. Imagine flying through time and seeing your home, and world as you knew it, vanish. It reads as an incredibly disorienting experience. And this possibility of stopping at the wrong time and fusing with some obstruction in his position seems like a massive red flag. The logic that Wells presents shows how deep he went in imagining what time travel would be like. He intuitively analyzed many of the potential pitfalls that could occur.

• “What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be incontinently slain.”

And here begins the traveler’s speculative musings on the futurity of man. I enjoy this aspect of the story in particular because of my own fascination with humanity’s future. Here he contemplates what we might turn into. Projecting forward, knowing that our species has a long history of warring against each other, it would be a safe bet that that would continue. It has for some time. But is it intrinsic to what our species is? One read of this quote is that the Traveler thinks cruelty is currently uncommon, and that we might devolve into being cruel creatures. Wells and the Time Traveler are from England. They grew up as citizens of a colonial power, used to a culture of cruel conquest. They are also used to thinking that to maintain their civilization some other peoples need to be on the sacrificial end. This dichotomic mentality deems all other lives expendable on their route to control, and maybe this line of thinking from the Time Traveler is an example of that mentality bleeding over into his predictions. When I read that last sentence of the quote I couldn’t help but think about the British colonist’s warped rationale for incontinently slaying the indigenous peoples of Australia or N. America. A bit of projection maybe?
Now he’ll actually stop at a time, far different than his own. A moment in time where mother nature’s diversity has been restored, while humanity is “upon the wane.”

• “You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children- asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! … A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

The anticipation of a progressive revolution speaks to his belief in humanity’s continued evolution (whatever that means). It can be coming from a societally egoistic perspective or a self-ego perspective, being that the Time Traveler can see himself as a revolutionary inventor. Thinking that we will always be progressing doesn’t take into account the pitfalls that come from our expansion.
I think that Wells actually does a nice job in creating this character that doesn’t get lost in himself too much, and tends to stick to ideas about the world. He rolls with the punches of having some of his hypotheses turn out wrong. He is human of course and does have brief episodes of existential dread, but the plot is more important than character to this story. In a way it is more captivating that way. The protagonist can be an amorphous entity for the reader to plop themselves into to experience the imaginary world of time travel.
Meeting the Eloi people in this moment shatters the glass of that societal ego. Our traveler was so looking forward to ascertaining the future’s wisdom. My interpretation is that The Time Machine is unwittingly prophetic in distinct ways. And that the future’s wisdom is revealed. More to come.

• “For the first time I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life-the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure-had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”
• “Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.”

He finds a world where the small population of Eloi are thought to be our last descendants. There is very little modern architecture left, and even less not fully claimed back by vegetation. Wondering why there are so few people left and why no one is doing any work, he speculates that it might be the logical order of a fully realized civilized world. A utopia of sorts where life is so easy that we have adjusted to a life of physical and mental sloth. The idea of the exponentially increasing civilizing process is a prevalent idea in present day thought. First it assumes that civility = collective good, when practically speaking only a subset of our population benefits from this modernity while the other part either toils to maintain it or gets excluded from it. Which brings up another variable when projecting forward, which is; what happens to class and human exploitation. The trend of modernity, industrialization, civilization or whatever you want to call it hasn’t necessarily been in effort to make life easier in those respects. Some technologies and medicines have of course had positive effects, but toil and hardship has stayed steadfast (4). You can even argue that there were many ‘primitive’ societies that lived more sustainably and with less toil than us (5). What I’m ultimately saying is that “ameliorating the conditions of life” can be helped of course by developments in our understanding about the world (such as in medical science and tech), but that one of those developments has to be an egalitarian and democratic society. At least if we want to shoot for utopia.
Anyway, this timeline of history doesn’t entirely hold up as the Time Traveler searches for more clues.

• “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!"

We cannot fully affirm the Time Traveler’s conjecture anymore because he has proven himself fallible. Yet he does make some convincing arguments for certain aspects of the changed world. These must be considered. I like that he’s not an all knowing narrator. He is trying his best to have educated hypotheses about this confusing new age.

• “Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man.”

Here I agree with him that our proclivity for battle is a negative. I feel linking “physical courage and the love of battle” either doesn’t translate well to today (and I’m not understanding) or they are distinctly separate tendencies. You can be courageous and put your body on the line for the greater good of humanity; hence it wouldn’t be a hinderance. That can be through battle or it can be through other means like protest. And once again the Time Traveler makes a distinction here between civilized man and humanity in general. His use of vocabulary like “savage” and “civilized” throughout the novella depict a man who sees himself as a distinct version of humanity or an entirely different being in general. One that’s superior to other peoples. This thinking is in line with 19th century European views and informs their creation of the defunct classification of race (6).

• “The Time Machine was gone! At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.”

After a day getting acquainted with his surroundings he gets this heart stopper. Coming to the conclusion that his invention must have been moved deliberately, he begins his search for the culprit. It couldn’t have been the “indolent” Eloi. He befriends one of them that he names Weena and she joins the traveler on his explorations.

• “But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, ob-scene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”

His first encounter with the Morlocks, the Eloi’s underground counterparts.

• “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.”

I had to stop and think about this one. Could it be possible for a class divide of peoples that stretches on for millennia to actually produce distinct creatures? I think 800,000 years is long enough for a species to evolve some changed features, especially moving down into a subterranean environment. Still, the people that lived there would have to have been forced to live there by the upper worlders. In a Capitalist vs laborer dynamic we know from history that uprisings would likely occur amongst the subjugated class which would make it difficult for the dynamic to stay so divided. Especially if the Eloi ancestors were dependent on the labor that the Morlock ancestors were producing, as the traveler hypothesizes. As long as humans have been organizing together there have been some who selfishly try to extract a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of others; at the expense of equality. I think Wells recognizes an existing class divide and extrapolates out from there to create a semi-logical science fiction future. From a capitalist’s perspective having a labor force trapped underground, unable to complain or taint the image of your exclusive eden, seems ideal. This imagery is extremely reminiscent of another classic short story called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (7). Wells’ conceives of many possible variables that might’ve shaped his world, but leaves room for a reader to interpret. I want to take some of his prophetic descriptions and offer up my own reading after the following quote.

• “I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun.”

Well Wells, maybe it was hotter because of human induced climate change. There are plenty of anecdotes in the story that describe humanity as the main arbiter of earth’s future changes. We all tend to acknowledge that as a matter of fact. The agricultural and industrial revolutions proved that we, more than any other species, shape the landscape of the world. But having the hindsight of 21st century knowledge really informs how I see The Time Machine. In the story humanity has decreased in numbers drastically, has devolved in its intellectual capacity, and our infrastructures have collapsed. Humans no longer are “progressing” in the modern sense where progress gets unnecessarily linked with expansion, extraction, and exploitation. Perhaps they are just living sustainably like any other creature. I know a small mention about the climate being hotter doesn’t explicitly point to climate change being the culprit for the Eloi’s reality. Still, could it be that the big existential crisis of our time was never remedied and this led to mass degradation of human society? Some of our smartest minds tend to think this is what’s coming for us (8). Maybe the forces of change ran half of humanity underground and that’s what birthed the Morlocks. Maybe traversing time in The Time Machine was in effort to glimpse into our unassured future.

• “However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.”

A great example of the simplistic inclination we have to sympathize with who/what-ever looks most like us. It’s not to say it’s not practical because instinctually we gravitate towards our families who of course resemble us the most. But to overlook the science in favor of habit and familiarity has put humanity at odds with itself and the ecosystem. No matter the race, nationality, or however we choose to divide, the science says that we are all practically the same, with the same basic needs and desires. The same is true of us and the rest of the biosphere full of carbon based life forms. Disassociating ourselves from that collective has given us the illusion of invincibility. The repercussions will be severe.

• “I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss.”

Finally after many dramatic happenings (that I can keep listing but I genuinely recommend you read) the Time Traveler has found his machine and is able to return to a more familiar time. Recounting his experience is almost like thinking on a dream. His friends will hardly believe the tale and maybe some part of himself doesn’t either. Remember, if time is truly a construction of a conscious mind then maybe the time machine was merely a device that allowed the traveler to explore their own minds imagination of a prospective future. An experience akin to a deep psychedelic trip or lucid dreaming. In that case he might have thought that progress was inevitable but subconsciously knew that civilization “must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.” Surely some will think he’s just mad. I choose to believe the traveler’s account and take the revelation as what’s possibly to come on our current path.

• “No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?"

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-an-illusion/
2. https://medium.com/@imshub13/why-time-is-not-the-fourth-dimension-c520161ea6d9
3. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=eHT43wfyw-sC&lpg=PA1&ots=edPFq4SIKR&dq=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&lr&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&f=false
5. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4326670/
7. https://www.ceremade.dauphine.f~ekeland/lectures/Mathematical%20Models%20in%20Social%20Sciences/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf
8. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/climate-change-predictions-2070

Like the title says this is a review of the novella by H.G. Wells. This is including spoilers*. I would love to see what anyone thinks about the ideas presented in the story, if anyone has other interpretations or agrees with mine. I posted it in full here, but also on Substack if anyone cares to check that out. No obligation of course.
The stories of H.G.Wells are rich and captivating worlds where he makes the unfathomable seem plausible. Wells uses concepts from the sciences readily in his writing as a base of reality. His protagonists tend to be inquisitive types that posit questions about the state of the world, often giving and testing their hypotheses along a surreal adventure. In The Time Machine our protagonist is simply and ambiguously labeled the Time Traveler. He has just transformed physics forever by creating a vehicle that can fold and traverse spacetime. Now he aims to demonstrate to his civilized friends his unbelievable achievement. In a way this demonstration is both a primer for them and a reassurance for himself that he is not in a fantasy.

• “Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

This is a question the Time Traveler asks his dinner party audience in order to introduce the concept of Time as the 4th dimension. He claims you need “duration” for anything to truly exist. If a cube only exists for an imperceptible instant then did it really exist? It’s a question that provokes a bunch of thoughts. How long is an instant? If an instant is measurable then the cube did exist for a time, no? But without the evidence of creation or decay of the cube how can we be certain that it existed? This question is a seemingly untestable hypothetical.

• “But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

The idea of memories being a way to time travel brings into thought a swell of philosophy. Is time really just a figment of consciousness. A way for humans to make sense of the world, to traverse it, to learn from it. Many scientists seem to think so (1). A mind altering realization that I can’t truly grasp fully. But what if in a way thinking of time as just a construct of the mind might reveal an ultimate interpretation of this extraordinary tale that’s being told. I’m sure it’s read that way by some.
Also, ‘if ever a creature could figure out time travel it’s humans’, believes the Time Traveler. His distinction between “civilized” man and a “savage” is problematic to say the least, but we’ll revisit that later because it has major bearing on how our protagonist sees the world.
Distinguishing the 4th dimension of Time as another measure of existence (like the 3 Euclidian measures of height, length and width) is a way for the reader, and the dinner party audience, to conceptualize it as a plane that we can move along. Today scientists still haven’t cracked the code of time travel and some contest Time being the 4th dimension at all. (2)(3)

• “The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated— was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction-possibly a far-reaching explosion-would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine”

Here the Time Traveler is describing his first, future time warp. Imagine flying through time and seeing your home, and world as you knew it, vanish. It reads as an incredibly disorienting experience. And this possibility of stopping at the wrong time and fusing with some obstruction in his position seems like a massive red flag. The logic that Wells presents shows how deep he went in imagining what time travel would be like. He intuitively analyzed many of the potential pitfalls that could occur.

• “What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be incontinently slain.”

And here begins the traveler’s speculative musings on the futurity of man. I enjoy this aspect of the story in particular because of my own fascination with humanity’s future. Here he contemplates what we might turn into. Projecting forward, knowing that our species has a long history of warring against each other, it would be a safe bet that that would continue. It has for some time. But is it intrinsic to what our species is? One read of this quote is that the Traveler thinks cruelty is currently uncommon, and that we might devolve into being cruel creatures. Wells and the Time Traveler are from England. They grew up as citizens of a colonial power, used to a culture of cruel conquest. They are also used to thinking that to maintain their civilization some other peoples need to be on the sacrificial end. This dichotomic mentality deems all other lives expendable on their route to control, and maybe this line of thinking from the Time Traveler is an example of that mentality bleeding over into his predictions. When I read that last sentence of the quote I couldn’t help but think about the British colonist’s warped rationale for incontinently slaying the indigenous peoples of Australia or N. America. A bit of projection maybe?
Now he’ll actually stop at a time, far different than his own. A moment in time where mother nature’s diversity has been restored, while humanity is “upon the wane.”

• “You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children- asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! … A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

The anticipation of a progressive revolution speaks to his belief in humanity’s continued evolution (whatever that means). It can be coming from a societally egoistic perspective or a self-ego perspective, being that the Time Traveler can see himself as a revolutionary inventor. Thinking that we will always be progressing doesn’t take into account the pitfalls that come from our expansion.
I think that Wells actually does a nice job in creating this character that doesn’t get lost in himself too much, and tends to stick to ideas about the world. He rolls with the punches of having some of his hypotheses turn out wrong. He is human of course and does have brief episodes of existential dread, but the plot is more important than character to this story. In a way it is more captivating that way. The protagonist can be an amorphous entity for the reader to plop themselves into to experience the imaginary world of time travel.
Meeting the Eloi people in this moment shatters the glass of that societal ego. Our traveler was so looking forward to ascertaining the future’s wisdom. My interpretation is that The Time Machine is unwittingly prophetic in distinct ways. And that the future’s wisdom is revealed. More to come.

• “For the first time I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life-the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure-had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”
• “Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.”

He finds a world where the small population of Eloi are thought to be our last descendants. There is very little modern architecture left, and even less not fully claimed back by vegetation. Wondering why there are so few people left and why no one is doing any work, he speculates that it might be the logical order of a fully realized civilized world. A utopia of sorts where life is so easy that we have adjusted to a life of physical and mental sloth. The idea of the exponentially increasing civilizing process is a prevalent idea in present day thought. First it assumes that civility = collective good, when practically speaking only a subset of our population benefits from this modernity while the other part either toils to maintain it or gets excluded from it. Which brings up another variable when projecting forward, which is; what happens to class and human exploitation. The trend of modernity, industrialization, civilization or whatever you want to call it hasn’t necessarily been in effort to make life easier in those respects. Some technologies and medicines have of course had positive effects, but toil and hardship has stayed steadfast (4). You can even argue that there were many ‘primitive’ societies that lived more sustainably and with less toil than us (5). What I’m ultimately saying is that “ameliorating the conditions of life” can be helped of course by developments in our understanding about the world (such as in medical science and tech), but that one of those developments has to be an egalitarian and democratic society. At least if we want to shoot for utopia.
Anyway, this timeline of history doesn’t entirely hold up as the Time Traveler searches for more clues.

• “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!"

We cannot fully affirm the Time Traveler’s conjecture anymore because he has proven himself fallible. Yet he does make some convincing arguments for certain aspects of the changed world. These must be considered. I like that he’s not an all knowing narrator. He is trying his best to have educated hypotheses about this confusing new age.

• “Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man.”

Here I agree with him that our proclivity for battle is a negative. I feel linking “physical courage and the love of battle” either doesn’t translate well to today (and I’m not understanding) or they are distinctly separate tendencies. You can be courageous and put your body on the line for the greater good of humanity; hence it wouldn’t be a hinderance. That can be through battle or it can be through other means like protest. And once again the Time Traveler makes a distinction here between civilized man and humanity in general. His use of vocabulary like “savage” and “civilized” throughout the novella depict a man who sees himself as a distinct version of humanity or an entirely different being in general. One that’s superior to other peoples. This thinking is in line with 19th century European views and informs their creation of the defunct classification of race (6).

• “The Time Machine was gone! At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.”

After a day getting acquainted with his surroundings he gets this heart stopper. Coming to the conclusion that his invention must have been moved deliberately, he begins his search for the culprit. It couldn’t have been the “indolent” Eloi. He befriends one of them that he names Weena and she joins the traveler on his explorations.

• “But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, ob-scene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”

His first encounter with the Morlocks, the Eloi’s underground counterparts.

• “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.”

I had to stop and think about this one. Could it be possible for a class divide of peoples that stretches on for millennia to actually produce distinct creatures? I think 800,000 years is long enough for a species to evolve some changed features, especially moving down into a subterranean environment. Still, the people that lived there would have to have been forced to live there by the upper worlders. In a Capitalist vs laborer dynamic we know from history that uprisings would likely occur amongst the subjugated class which would make it difficult for the dynamic to stay so divided. Especially if the Eloi ancestors were dependent on the labor that the Morlock ancestors were producing, as the traveler hypothesizes. As long as humans have been organizing together there have been some who selfishly try to extract a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of others; at the expense of equality. I think Wells recognizes an existing class divide and extrapolates out from there to create a semi-logical science fiction future. From a capitalist’s perspective having a labor force trapped underground, unable to complain or taint the image of your exclusive eden, seems ideal. This imagery is extremely reminiscent of another classic short story called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (7). Wells’ conceives of many possible variables that might’ve shaped his world, but leaves room for a reader to interpret. I want to take some of his prophetic descriptions and offer up my own reading after the following quote.

• “I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun.”

Well Wells, maybe it was hotter because of human induced climate change. There are plenty of anecdotes in the story that describe humanity as the main arbiter of earth’s future changes. We all tend to acknowledge that as a matter of fact. The agricultural and industrial revolutions proved that we, more than any other species, shape the landscape of the world. But having the hindsight of 21st century knowledge really informs how I see The Time Machine. In the story humanity has decreased in numbers drastically, has devolved in its intellectual capacity, and our infrastructures have collapsed. Humans no longer are “progressing” in the modern sense where progress gets unnecessarily linked with expansion, extraction, and exploitation. Perhaps they are just living sustainably like any other creature. I know a small mention about the climate being hotter doesn’t explicitly point to climate change being the culprit for the Eloi’s reality. Still, could it be that the big existential crisis of our time was never remedied and this led to mass degradation of human society? Some of our smartest minds tend to think this is what’s coming for us (8). Maybe the forces of change ran half of humanity underground and that’s what birthed the Morlocks. Maybe traversing time in The Time Machine was in effort to glimpse into our unassured future.

• “However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.”

A great example of the simplistic inclination we have to sympathize with who/what-ever looks most like us. It’s not to say it’s not practical because instinctually we gravitate towards our families who of course resemble us the most. But to overlook the science in favor of habit and familiarity has put humanity at odds with itself and the ecosystem. No matter the race, nationality, or however we choose to divide, the science says that we are all practically the same, with the same basic needs and desires. The same is true of us and the rest of the biosphere full of carbon based life forms. Disassociating ourselves from that collective has given us the illusion of invincibility. The repercussions will be severe.

• “I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss.”

Finally after many dramatic happenings (that I can keep listing but I genuinely recommend you read) the Time Traveler has found his machine and is able to return to a more familiar time. Recounting his experience is almost like thinking on a dream. His friends will hardly believe the tale and maybe some part of himself doesn’t either. Remember, if time is truly a construction of a conscious mind then maybe the time machine was merely a device that allowed the traveler to explore their own minds imagination of a prospective future. An experience akin to a deep psychedelic trip or lucid dreaming. In that case he might have thought that progress was inevitable but subconsciously knew that civilization “must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.” Surely some will think he’s just mad. I choose to believe the traveler’s account and take the revelation as what’s possibly to come on our current path.

• “No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?"

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-an-illusion/
2. https://medium.com/@imshub13/why-time-is-not-the-fourth-dimension-c520161ea6d9
3. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=eHT43wfyw-sC&lpg=PA1&ots=edPFq4SIKR&dq=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&lr&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&f=false
5. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4326670/
7. https://www.ceremade.dauphine.f~ekeland/lectures/Mathematical%20Models%20in%20Social%20Sciences/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf
8. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/climate-change-predictions-2070

Like the title says this is a review of the novella by H.G. Wells. This is including spoilers*. I would love to see what anyone thinks about the ideas presented in the story, if anyone has other interpretations or agrees with mine.
The stories of H.G.Wells are rich and captivating worlds where he makes the unfathomable seem plausible. Wells uses concepts from the sciences readily in his writing as a base of reality. His protagonists tend to be inquisitive types that posit questions about the state of the world, often giving and testing their hypotheses along a surreal adventure. In The Time Machine our protagonist is simply and ambiguously labeled the Time Traveler. He has just transformed physics forever by creating a vehicle that can fold and traverse spacetime. Now he aims to demonstrate to his civilized friends his unbelievable achievement. In a way this demonstration is both a primer for them and a reassurance for himself that he is not in a fantasy.

• “Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

This is a question the Time Traveler asks his dinner party audience in order to introduce the concept of Time as the 4th dimension. He claims you need “duration” for anything to truly exist. If a cube only exists for an imperceptible instant then did it really exist? It’s a question that provokes a bunch of thoughts. How long is an instant? If an instant is measurable then the cube did exist for a time, no? But without the evidence of creation or decay of the cube how can we be certain that it existed? This question is a seemingly untestable hypothetical.

• “But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

The idea of memories being a way to time travel brings into thought a swell of philosophy. Is time really just a figment of consciousness. A way for humans to make sense of the world, to traverse it, to learn from it. Many scientists seem to think so (1). A mind altering realization that I can’t truly grasp fully. But what if in a way thinking of time as just a construct of the mind might reveal an ultimate interpretation of this extraordinary tale that’s being told. I’m sure it’s read that way by some.
Also, ‘if ever a creature could figure out time travel it’s humans’, believes the Time Traveler. His distinction between “civilized” man and a “savage” is problematic to say the least, but we’ll revisit that later because it has major bearing on how our protagonist sees the world.
Distinguishing the 4th dimension of Time as another measure of existence (like the 3 Euclidian measures of height, length and width) is a way for the reader, and the dinner party audience, to conceptualize it as a plane that we can move along. Today scientists still haven’t cracked the code of time travel and some contest Time being the 4th dimension at all. (2)(3)

• “The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated— was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction-possibly a far-reaching explosion-would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine”

Here the Time Traveler is describing his first, future time warp. Imagine flying through time and seeing your home, and world as you knew it, vanish. It reads as an incredibly disorienting experience. And this possibility of stopping at the wrong time and fusing with some obstruction in his position seems like a massive red flag. The logic that Wells presents shows how deep he went in imagining what time travel would be like. He intuitively analyzed many of the potential pitfalls that could occur.

• “What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be incontinently slain.”

And here begins the traveler’s speculative musings on the futurity of man. I enjoy this aspect of the story in particular because of my own fascination with humanity’s future. Here he contemplates what we might turn into. Projecting forward, knowing that our species has a long history of warring against each other, it would be a safe bet that that would continue. It has for some time. But is it intrinsic to what our species is? One read of this quote is that the Traveler thinks cruelty is currently uncommon, and that we might devolve into being cruel creatures. Wells and the Time Traveler are from England. They grew up as citizens of a colonial power, used to a culture of cruel conquest. They are also used to thinking that to maintain their civilization some other peoples need to be on the sacrificial end. This dichotomic mentality deems all other lives expendable on their route to control, and maybe this line of thinking from the Time Traveler is an example of that mentality bleeding over into his predictions. When I read that last sentence of the quote I couldn’t help but think about the British colonist’s warped rationale for incontinently slaying the indigenous peoples of Australia or N. America. A bit of projection maybe?
Now he’ll actually stop at a time, far different than his own. A moment in time where mother nature’s diversity has been restored, while humanity is “upon the wane.”

• “You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children- asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! … A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

The anticipation of a progressive revolution speaks to his belief in humanity’s continued evolution (whatever that means). It can be coming from a societally egoistic perspective or a self-ego perspective, being that the Time Traveler can see himself as a revolutionary inventor. Thinking that we will always be progressing doesn’t take into account the pitfalls that come from our expansion.
I think that Wells actually does a nice job in creating this character that doesn’t get lost in himself too much, and tends to stick to ideas about the world. He rolls with the punches of having some of his hypotheses turn out wrong. He is human of course and does have brief episodes of existential dread, but the plot is more important than character to this story. In a way it is more captivating that way. The protagonist can be an amorphous entity for the reader to plop themselves into to experience the imaginary world of time travel.
Meeting the Eloi people in this moment shatters the glass of that societal ego. Our traveler was so looking forward to ascertaining the future’s wisdom. My interpretation is that The Time Machine is unwittingly prophetic in distinct ways. And that the future’s wisdom is revealed. More to come.

• “For the first time I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life-the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure-had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”
• “Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.”

He finds a world where the small population of Eloi are thought to be our last descendants. There is very little modern architecture left, and even less not fully claimed back by vegetation. Wondering why there are so few people left and why no one is doing any work, he speculates that it might be the logical order of a fully realized civilized world. A utopia of sorts where life is so easy that we have adjusted to a life of physical and mental sloth. The idea of the exponentially increasing civilizing process is a prevalent idea in present day thought. First it assumes that civility = collective good, when practically speaking only a subset of our population benefits from this modernity while the other part either toils to maintain it or gets excluded from it. Which brings up another variable when projecting forward, which is; what happens to class and human exploitation. The trend of modernity, industrialization, civilization or whatever you want to call it hasn’t necessarily been in effort to make life easier in those respects. Some technologies and medicines have of course had positive effects, but toil and hardship has stayed steadfast (4). You can even argue that there were many ‘primitive’ societies that lived more sustainably and with less toil than us (5). What I’m ultimately saying is that “ameliorating the conditions of life” can be helped of course by developments in our understanding about the world (such as in medical science and tech), but that one of those developments has to be an egalitarian and democratic society. At least if we want to shoot for utopia.
Anyway, this timeline of history doesn’t entirely hold up as the Time Traveler searches for more clues.

• “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!"

We cannot fully affirm the Time Traveler’s conjecture anymore because he has proven himself fallible. Yet he does make some convincing arguments for certain aspects of the changed world. These must be considered. I like that he’s not an all knowing narrator. He is trying his best to have educated hypotheses about this confusing new age.

• “Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man.”

Here I agree with him that our proclivity for battle is a negative. I feel linking “physical courage and the love of battle” either doesn’t translate well to today (and I’m not understanding) or they are distinctly separate tendencies. You can be courageous and put your body on the line for the greater good of humanity; hence it wouldn’t be a hinderance. That can be through battle or it can be through other means like protest. And once again the Time Traveler makes a distinction here between civilized man and humanity in general. His use of vocabulary like “savage” and “civilized” throughout the novella depict a man who sees himself as a distinct version of humanity or an entirely different being in general. One that’s superior to other peoples. This thinking is in line with 19th century European views and informs their creation of the defunct classification of race (6).

• “The Time Machine was gone! At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.”

After a day getting acquainted with his surroundings he gets this heart stopper. Coming to the conclusion that his invention must have been moved deliberately, he begins his search for the culprit. It couldn’t have been the “indolent” Eloi. He befriends one of them that he names Weena and she joins the traveler on his explorations.

• “But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, ob-scene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”

His first encounter with the Morlocks, the Eloi’s underground counterparts.

• “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.”

I had to stop and think about this one. Could it be possible for a class divide of peoples that stretches on for millennia to actually produce distinct creatures? I think 800,000 years is long enough for a species to evolve some changed features, especially moving down into a subterranean environment. Still, the people that lived there would have to have been forced to live there by the upper worlders. In a Capitalist vs laborer dynamic we know from history that uprisings would likely occur amongst the subjugated class which would make it difficult for the dynamic to stay so divided. Especially if the Eloi ancestors were dependent on the labor that the Morlock ancestors were producing, as the traveler hypothesizes. As long as humans have been organizing together there have been some who selfishly try to extract a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of others; at the expense of equality. I think Wells recognizes an existing class divide and extrapolates out from there to create a semi-logical science fiction future. From a capitalist’s perspective having a labor force trapped underground, unable to complain or taint the image of your exclusive eden, seems ideal. This imagery is extremely reminiscent of another classic short story called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (7). Wells’ conceives of many possible variables that might’ve shaped his world, but leaves room for a reader to interpret. I want to take some of his prophetic descriptions and offer up my own reading after the following quote.

• “I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun.”

Well Wells, maybe it was hotter because of human induced climate change. There are plenty of anecdotes in the story that describe humanity as the main arbiter of earth’s future changes. We all tend to acknowledge that as a matter of fact. The agricultural and industrial revolutions proved that we, more than any other species, shape the landscape of the world. But having the hindsight of 21st century knowledge really informs how I see The Time Machine. In the story humanity has decreased in numbers drastically, has devolved in its intellectual capacity, and our infrastructures have collapsed. Humans no longer are “progressing” in the modern sense where progress gets unnecessarily linked with expansion, extraction, and exploitation. Perhaps they are just living sustainably like any other creature. I know a small mention about the climate being hotter doesn’t explicitly point to climate change being the culprit for the Eloi’s reality. Still, could it be that the big existential crisis of our time was never remedied and this led to mass degradation of human society? Some of our smartest minds tend to think this is what’s coming for us (8). Maybe the forces of change ran half of humanity underground and that’s what birthed the Morlocks. Maybe traversing time in The Time Machine was in effort to glimpse into our unassured future.

• “However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.”

A great example of the simplistic inclination we have to sympathize with who/what-ever looks most like us. It’s not to say it’s not practical because instinctually we gravitate towards our families who of course resemble us the most. But to overlook the science in favor of habit and familiarity has put humanity at odds with itself and the ecosystem. No matter the race, nationality, or however we choose to divide, the science says that we are all practically the same, with the same basic needs and desires. The same is true of us and the rest of the biosphere full of carbon based life forms. Disassociating ourselves from that collective has given us the illusion of invincibility. The repercussions will be severe.

• “I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss.”

Finally after many dramatic happenings (that I can keep listing but I genuinely recommend you read) the Time Traveler has found his machine and is able to return to a more familiar time. Recounting his experience is almost like thinking on a dream. His friends will hardly believe the tale and maybe some part of himself doesn’t either. Remember, if time is truly a construction of a conscious mind then maybe the time machine was merely a device that allowed the traveler to explore their own minds imagination of a prospective future. An experience akin to a deep psychedelic trip or lucid dreaming. In that case he might have thought that progress was inevitable but subconsciously knew that civilization “must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.” Surely some will think he’s just mad. I choose to believe the traveler’s account and take the revelation as what’s possibly to come on our current path.

• “No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?"

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-an-illusion/
2. https://medium.com/@imshub13/why-time-is-not-the-fourth-dimension-c520161ea6d9
3. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=eHT43wfyw-sC&lpg=PA1&ots=edPFq4SIKR&dq=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&lr&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&f=false
5. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4326670/
7. https://www.ceremade.dauphine.f~ekeland/lectures/Mathematical%20Models%20in%20Social%20Sciences/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf
8. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/climate-change-predictions-2070

Like the title says this is a review of the novella by H.G. Wells. This is including spoilers*. I would love to see what anyone thinks about the ideas presented in the story, if anyone has other interpretations or agrees with mine. I posted it in full here, but also on Substack if anyone cares to check that out. No obligation of course.
The stories of H.G.Wells are rich and captivating worlds where he makes the unfathomable seem plausible. Wells uses concepts from the sciences readily in his writing as a base of reality. His protagonists tend to be inquisitive types that posit questions about the state of the world, often giving and testing their hypotheses along a surreal adventure. In The Time Machine our protagonist is simply and ambiguously labeled the Time Traveler. He has just transformed physics forever by creating a vehicle that can fold and traverse spacetime. Now he aims to demonstrate to his civilized friends his unbelievable achievement. In a way this demonstration is both a primer for them and a reassurance for himself that he is not in a fantasy.

• “Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

This is a question the Time Traveler asks his dinner party audience in order to introduce the concept of Time as the 4th dimension. He claims you need “duration” for anything to truly exist. If a cube only exists for an imperceptible instant then did it really exist? It’s a question that provokes a bunch of thoughts. How long is an instant? If an instant is measurable then the cube did exist for a time, no? But without the evidence of creation or decay of the cube how can we be certain that it existed? This question is a seemingly untestable hypothetical.

• “But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

The idea of memories being a way to time travel brings into thought a swell of philosophy. Is time really just a figment of consciousness. A way for humans to make sense of the world, to traverse it, to learn from it. Many scientists seem to think so (1). A mind altering realization that I can’t truly grasp fully. But what if in a way thinking of time as just a construct of the mind might reveal an ultimate interpretation of this extraordinary tale that’s being told. I’m sure it’s read that way by some.
Also, ‘if ever a creature could figure out time travel it’s humans’, believes the Time Traveler. His distinction between “civilized” man and a “savage” is problematic to say the least, but we’ll revisit that later because it has major bearing on how our protagonist sees the world.
Distinguishing the 4th dimension of Time as another measure of existence (like the 3 Euclidian measures of height, length and width) is a way for the reader, and the dinner party audience, to conceptualize it as a plane that we can move along. Today scientists still haven’t cracked the code of time travel and some contest Time being the 4th dimension at all. (2)(3)

• “The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered: I was, so to speak, attenuated— was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction-possibly a far-reaching explosion-would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine”

Here the Time Traveler is describing his first, future time warp. Imagine flying through time and seeing your home, and world as you knew it, vanish. It reads as an incredibly disorienting experience. And this possibility of stopping at the wrong time and fusing with some obstruction in his position seems like a massive red flag. The logic that Wells presents shows how deep he went in imagining what time travel would be like. He intuitively analyzed many of the potential pitfalls that could occur.

• “What might appear when that hazy curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness, a foul creature to be incontinently slain.”

And here begins the traveler’s speculative musings on the futurity of man. I enjoy this aspect of the story in particular because of my own fascination with humanity’s future. Here he contemplates what we might turn into. Projecting forward, knowing that our species has a long history of warring against each other, it would be a safe bet that that would continue. It has for some time. But is it intrinsic to what our species is? One read of this quote is that the Traveler thinks cruelty is currently uncommon, and that we might devolve into being cruel creatures. Wells and the Time Traveler are from England. They grew up as citizens of a colonial power, used to a culture of cruel conquest. They are also used to thinking that to maintain their civilization some other peoples need to be on the sacrificial end. This dichotomic mentality deems all other lives expendable on their route to control, and maybe this line of thinking from the Time Traveler is an example of that mentality bleeding over into his predictions. When I read that last sentence of the quote I couldn’t help but think about the British colonist’s warped rationale for incontinently slaying the indigenous peoples of Australia or N. America. A bit of projection maybe?
Now he’ll actually stop at a time, far different than his own. A moment in time where mother nature’s diversity has been restored, while humanity is “upon the wane.”

• “You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children- asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! … A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

The anticipation of a progressive revolution speaks to his belief in humanity’s continued evolution (whatever that means). It can be coming from a societally egoistic perspective or a self-ego perspective, being that the Time Traveler can see himself as a revolutionary inventor. Thinking that we will always be progressing doesn’t take into account the pitfalls that come from our expansion.
I think that Wells actually does a nice job in creating this character that doesn’t get lost in himself too much, and tends to stick to ideas about the world. He rolls with the punches of having some of his hypotheses turn out wrong. He is human of course and does have brief episodes of existential dread, but the plot is more important than character to this story. In a way it is more captivating that way. The protagonist can be an amorphous entity for the reader to plop themselves into to experience the imaginary world of time travel.
Meeting the Eloi people in this moment shatters the glass of that societal ego. Our traveler was so looking forward to ascertaining the future’s wisdom. My interpretation is that The Time Machine is unwittingly prophetic in distinct ways. And that the future’s wisdom is revealed. More to come.

• “For the first time I began to realise an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life-the true civilising process that makes life more and more secure-had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”
  
• “Social triumphs, too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.”
  

He finds a world where the small population of Eloi are thought to be our last descendants. There is very little modern architecture left, and even less not fully claimed back by vegetation. Wondering why there are so few people left and why no one is doing any work, he speculates that it might be the logical order of a fully realized civilized world. A utopia of sorts where life is so easy that we have adjusted to a life of physical and mental sloth. The idea of the exponentially increasing civilizing process is a prevalent idea in present day thought. First it assumes that civility = collective good, when practically speaking only a subset of our population benefits from this modernity while the other part either toils to maintain it or gets excluded from it. Which brings up another variable when projecting forward, which is; what happens to class and human exploitation. The trend of modernity, industrialization, civilization or whatever you want to call it hasn’t necessarily been in effort to make life easier in those respects. Some technologies and medicines have of course had positive effects, but toil and hardship has stayed steadfast (4). You can even argue that there were many ‘primitive’ societies that lived more sustainably and with less toil than us (5). What I’m ultimately saying is that “ameliorating the conditions of life” can be helped of course by developments in our understanding about the world (such as in medical science and tech), but that one of those developments has to be an egalitarian and democratic society. At least if we want to shoot for utopia.
Anyway, this timeline of history doesn’t entirely hold up as the Time Traveler searches for more clues.

• “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!"

We cannot fully affirm the Time Traveler’s conjecture anymore because he has proven himself fallible. Yet he does make some convincing arguments for certain aspects of the changed world. These must be considered. I like that he’s not an all knowing narrator. He is trying his best to have educated hypotheses about this confusing new age.

• “Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilised man.”

Here I agree with him that our proclivity for battle is a negative. I feel linking “physical courage and the love of battle” either doesn’t translate well to today (and I’m not understanding) or they are distinctly separate tendencies. You can be courageous and put your body on the line for the greater good of humanity; hence it wouldn’t be a hinderance. That can be through battle or it can be through other means like protest. And once again the Time Traveler makes a distinction here between civilized man and humanity in general. His use of vocabulary like “savage” and “civilized” throughout the novella depict a man who sees himself as a distinct version of humanity or an entirely different being in general. One that’s superior to other peoples. This thinking is in line with 19th century European views and informs their creation of the defunct classification of race (6).

• “The Time Machine was gone! At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world.”

After a day getting acquainted with his surroundings he gets this heart stopper. Coming to the conclusion that his invention must have been moved deliberately, he begins his search for the culprit. It couldn’t have been the “indolent” Eloi. He befriends one of them that he names Weena and she joins the traveler on his explorations.

• “But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, ob-scene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”

His first encounter with the Morlocks, the Eloi’s underground counterparts.

• “At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.”

I had to stop and think about this one. Could it be possible for a class divide of peoples that stretches on for millennia to actually produce distinct creatures? I think 800,000 years is long enough for a species to evolve some changed features, especially moving down into a subterranean environment. Still, the people that lived there would have to have been forced to live there by the upper worlders. In a Capitalist vs laborer dynamic we know from history that uprisings would likely occur amongst the subjugated class which would make it difficult for the dynamic to stay so divided. Especially if the Eloi ancestors were dependent on the labor that the Morlock ancestors were producing, as the traveler hypothesizes. As long as humans have been organizing together there have been some who selfishly try to extract a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of others; at the expense of equality. I think Wells recognizes an existing class divide and extrapolates out from there to create a semi-logical science fiction future. From a capitalist’s perspective having a labor force trapped underground, unable to complain or taint the image of your exclusive eden, seems ideal. This imagery is extremely reminiscent of another classic short story called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (7). Wells’ conceives of many possible variables that might’ve shaped his world, but leaves room for a reader to interpret. I want to take some of his prophetic descriptions and offer up my own reading after the following quote.

• “I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was hotter, or the earth nearer the sun.”

Well Wells, maybe it was hotter because of human induced climate change. There are plenty of anecdotes in the story that describe humanity as the main arbiter of earth’s future changes. We all tend to acknowledge that as a matter of fact. The agricultural and industrial revolutions proved that we, more than any other species, shape the landscape of the world. But having the hindsight of 21st century knowledge really informs how I see The Time Machine. In the story humanity has decreased in numbers drastically, has devolved in its intellectual capacity, and our infrastructures have collapsed. Humans no longer are “progressing” in the modern sense where progress gets unnecessarily linked with expansion, extraction, and exploitation. Perhaps they are just living sustainably like any other creature. I know a small mention about the climate being hotter doesn’t explicitly point to climate change being the culprit for the Eloi’s reality. Still, could it be that the big existential crisis of our time was never remedied and this led to mass degradation of human society? Some of our smartest minds tend to think this is what’s coming for us (8). Maybe the forces of change ran half of humanity underground and that’s what birthed the Morlocks. Maybe traversing time in The Time Machine was in effort to glimpse into our unassured future.

• “However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.”

A great example of the simplistic inclination we have to sympathize with who/what-ever looks most like us. It’s not to say it’s not practical because instinctually we gravitate towards our families who of course resemble us the most. But to overlook the science in favor of habit and familiarity has put humanity at odds with itself and the ecosystem. No matter the race, nationality, or however we choose to divide, the science says that we are all practically the same, with the same basic needs and desires. The same is true of us and the rest of the biosphere full of carbon based life forms. Disassociating ourselves from that collective has given us the illusion of invincibility. The repercussions will be severe.

• “I felt the intensest wretchedness for the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity. Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss.”

Finally after many dramatic happenings (that I can keep listing but I genuinely recommend you read) the Time Traveler has found his machine and is able to return to a more familiar time. Recounting his experience is almost like thinking on a dream. His friends will hardly believe the tale and maybe some part of himself doesn’t either. Remember, if time is truly a construction of a conscious mind then maybe the time machine was merely a device that allowed the traveler to explore their own minds imagination of a prospective future. An experience akin to a deep psychedelic trip or lucid dreaming. In that case he might have thought that progress was inevitable but subconsciously knew that civilization “must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.” Surely some will think he’s just mad. I choose to believe the traveler’s account and take the revelation as what’s possibly to come on our current path.

• “No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?"

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-time-an-illusion/
2. https://medium.com/@imshub13/why-time-is-not-the-fourth-dimension-c520161ea6d9
3. https://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=eHT43wfyw-sC&lpg=PA1&ots=edPFq4SIKR&dq=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&lr&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q=ancient%20hours%20working%20lives&f=false
5. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4326670/
7. https://www.ceremade.dauphine.f~ekeland/lectures/Mathematical%20Models%20in%20Social%20Sciences/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf
8. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/climate-change-predictions-2070