He was an advocate of attention training – educating our senses to the specificities of every image in order to expand our experience of time (‘duration’) – or what he called an ‘attention to life’. Ĭan we will ourselves to go back in time? In one sense, Henri Bergson thought that we could do so. All the same, placing Dunne’s ideas alongside those of Matheson does reveal the latter as a veritable metaphysics at work beneath the sentimental gloss of Somewhere in Time – a metaphysics of both time and space, in particular, of dimensions, or scale. Given that Dunne’s metaphysics mostly concerns travel into the future, it may also seem perverse that we should emphasise its influence on a much more Proustian work, that is, a study of travel to the past, as Matheson offers. Rather, his novelistic and cinematic readings both apply and resist Dunne’s views, creating a distorting mirror – a refraction rather than simply a reflection. And yet Matheson’s is no straightforward implementation of Dunne’s work, a mere illustration of a philosophy. The reason we bring these together is because Matheson’s ideas about time, attention, and identity partly originate in Dunne’s philosophy. Dunne’s metaphysics of time and that of film, specifically, the idea of travelling back in time that Richard Matheson explored in his 1975 novel, Bid Time Return, and his screenplay of that book for Somewhere in Time (Szwarc, 1980). This essay approaches the subject of time-travel from two perspectives: that of philosophy – J.W.
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