"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

was in fact the scene of "hauntings",* a remarkable display of
poltergeist activity, between the years 2000 and 2003, which
only ended when the house was demolished and a new building,
attached to the Institute of National Nutrition, erected on the
site. In the year 2003 a person possessed of the paper, the

(* See Night 61, p. 179.)

pen-habits,* and the idiom of the period of the Six Years' War
would have been an oddity that no pseudonym could conceal
from us.
'In any case, the Storm is integral to all the entries from Night
63 to Night, [sic] and is not just "inserted". Messrs. Wormald
and Borrow must either neglect their own evidence and place
the whole composition after 1987, or else stick to their own
well-founded suspicions of the paper, the hand,* and the idiom,
and admit that some person or persons in the nineteen-forties
possessed a power of "prevision".
'Mr. Titmass informs me that he cannot find any record in the
nineteen-forties of the names given in the list. If therefore, any
such club existed at that earlier period, the names remain
pseudonyms. The forward dating might have been adopted as
an additional screen. But I am now convinced that the Papers -'.
are a work of fiction; and it may well be that the predictions
(notably of the Storm), though genuine and not coincidences,
were unconscious: giving one more glimpse of the strange
processes of so-called literary "invention", with which the
Papers are largely concerned.'

MEMBERS OF THE NOTION CLUB.

The Notion Club, as depicted, was informal and vague in
outline. A number of characters appear in the dialogues, some
rarely or fitfully. For the convenience of readers the List of
Members found among the Papers is here printed, though
several of the persons named do not appear in this selection.
The order is not alphabetical and seems intended to represent
some kind of seniority: the first six names were written earlier
and larger; the rest were added at various times and in different
inks, but in the same hand. There are also later entries inserted
after some of the names, recording details of their tastes or
history. A few further details, gleaned from the Papers them-
selves, have been added in brackets.

(* Mr. Wormald himself, something of an expert in such matters,
before he proposed his 'probable solution', ventured the opinion that
the handwriting of the Papers in general character went with the
old-fashioned idiom and belonged to the same period. The use of a pen
rather than a typewriter would indeed, in itself, already have been
most unusual for a man of 1990, whatever his age.)