RSS
I’ve completed my reading of John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain. While I can’t say that I recommend the read, I did enjoy the messages John Buchan has left me with. These morals from the book has prompted this post.
The book is about six people who are able to catch a glimpse of the future by viewing a newspaper. The book is divided into chapters about each and how they lived their lives after be able to peek through the gap in the curtain. From each example comes a lesson. This post divides up those lessons so I remember, and so you don’t have to read the book.
Mr. Arnold Tavanger
Without looking back at the book, here is what I recall. Arnold Tavanger’s glimpse into the future was a newspaper headline announcing the merger of a major metal company with a juggernaut of an enterprise. Finding that he could make some money from this knowledge, Arnold promptly sets off around the world to buy the majority of the shares for this company that will be acquired.
Arnold’s entrepreneurial adventures make him so happy that he comes across as childlike. One by one, he beats out the major enterprise negotiator to scoop up the controlling interest in this company. He becomes chairman, and starts to oversee production along with the impending negotiation of the merger.
Arnold decides that he wants to make 5 times the amount of money that he invested. Keep in mind that he didn’t see how much money the merger was for. He just saw that the companies merged. So when the gargantuan corporation offered to pay him twice his share, then three times his share, then four times his share, Arnold balked.
The corporation goes on to make a discovery that makes Arnold’s company obsolete, and Arnold ends up merging with the corporation for nickels on his dollar. The lesson of Arnold’s story:
Ignorance is bliss. As it states in the book, “For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he know nothing. If man knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup.”
The RT. HON. David Mayot
I honestly don’t recall anything from this chapter.
Mr Reginald Draker
Draker’s story is a funny one. He read that he would make a voyage to the Yucatan. Being the homebody and disbeliever that he was, he did everything in his power to avoid this fate. Then he fell in love, life took a series of changes, and he ended up going to a place called Yucatan.
Lesson: Life shapes our course sometimes no matter how hard we try shape life.
Sir Robert Goodeve
Goodeve is somewhat of a cautionary tale. He’s the guy who had it all together when getting the glimpse into the future, only to read about his own death when looking at the gap through the curtain. How would a man of such stature and composure respond to such disheartening news?
Well, fearfully. Goodeve spends the remainder of the year in fear and worry, visibly losing pounds, health and life. His eyes become hollow and he ends up ill. He dies the night before his obituary appears in the paper from nothing more than poor health caused by his fearfulness of the inevitable.
It sucks because I had such high hopes for Goodeve. On the outside, like a lot of people in our society, he had it all together. But on the inside, there wasn’t a foundation of strength. When one piece of fateful news struck, the foundation crumbled.
Lesson: Fear and worry will consume your life if you let it.
Captain Charles Ottery
Charlie also reads about his death when getting his glimpse of the future. And for a short time, he goes nuts.
He’s in love, and quickly decides that he shouldn’t tell his lover, nor should he even think about her. He starts losing focus and interest in work. Then he decides to go on hunting trips and adventures, taking extreme risks that give him infamous legendary status among the adventure guides.
After his date with invincibility wears off, he turns to alcohol. His reputation wanes. He’s floundering. That’s when he runs into his love, after not having seen her for six months. He doesn’t even look at her and won’t talk to her. Then he knows he really lost it.
He takes off into the countryside the next morning, going through unrelenting internal struggle with chaotic thoughts running through his head. He’s off the deep end. Then he runs into the girl and proceeds to tell her everything. The weight is lifted off his back, and knowing that he is still going to die, decides its best that this is their last goodbye.
The next day the girl shows up at his apartment and incessantly pleads with him to change his thinking towards this inevitable fate. She tries everything. Then this exchange goes down:
Charles: I’ve tried but I can’t. I simply haven’t the manhood…I know it’s the right way, but my mind is poisoned already. I’ve got a germ in it that fevers me…Besides it isn’t sense. You can’t stop what is to be by saying that it won’t be.
Pamela: Yes, you can, the girl said firmly. That is the meaning of Free Will.
Pamela, the girl 16 years younger, then asks Charles to marry her the date that he is slated to die. The idea is that if he has to something to live for, and that if he “wrestles hard enough with an angel, then it may bless you.”
Well, this saves Charles. His mind starts to get back in shape, he starts working, and he even writes in his journal that amongst the desert, the lone star that guides him is Pamela. That is, until Pamela gets pneumonia and is on her death bed. And again, Charles wrestles with the angel.
He wrestles so much that he comes to a conclusion: he can control his life, and what he cannot control, he has no hope controlling. When coming to grips with what he can control, and that Pamela’s death is outside of something he can’t control, he finds peace. Pamela gets better. They marry. June 10th comes, and Charles doesn’t even give a thought to looking in the paper. Turns out his 86 year old third cousin named Charles died, and the newspaper mistook the “8″ for a “3.”
Lesson: Control what you can control, wrestle with the angel and hope that it blesses you.
