Time II

"I can even remember from those days what must have been the first metaphysical argument I ever took part in. We debated whether the future was like a line you can't see or like a line that is not yet drawn. I have forgotten which side I took though I know that I took it with great zeal."

-CS Lewis, Surprised By Joy (London, 1964), II., p. 31.

Here, before anything else, we notice autobiographical time:

"I...remember from those days..."

"I have forgotten..."

Secondly, there is a philosophical discussion of time, relevant to The Time Machine, the Time Patrol etc.

My first response is as follows. The future is all the lines that are not yet drawn. A line that is merely not seen exists now and therefore is present, not future. Our seeing of it is in the future.

In Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time, the future can be compared to a line that we cannot see because time travellers can visit, then revisit, it and find it unchanged whereas, in Anderson's Time Patrol series, the future might be different when revisited. A line that can be erased? There is an underlying incoherence if not in the events as described in the Time Patrol series, then at least in the way that the characters discuss those events.