I was expecting some kind of tirade, but he desisted and instead led me across the Aldwych to Houghton Street. However, rather than turning left into the main lobby of the LSE, he turned right into the Students’ Union Building. He walked as if he knew the place. Rounding a corner we came to a lift with a difference.
It was more like a vertical escalator than a conventional lift. A series of compartments moved slowly but continually past the landing where we stood. All we had to do to get on was jump through the opening. To the left the compartments descended, to the right they ascended. We stood for a couple of minutes in silent contemplation of this mechanical oddity, then Jim turned on his heel with a vague gesture and said, ‘No waiting.’ We started back towards the entrance.
The Old Lecture Theatre must have been purpose-built as such when the Houghton Street building was erected in the Thirties. It was far wider than it was deep, and curiously wedge-shaped, like a slice of cake a compulsive eater might cut themselves. The lecture was sparsely attended; up in the gallery I could just see the round heads of a few diligent students, already bent and scribbling, while the scattered audience we sat among in the stalls seemed to consist of an odd assortment of octogenarians and the kind of slightly featureless black and brown men who one can tell immediately are perpetual students from the developing world. Men who have been spending years on writing doctoral theses on public policy in Coventry, while diligently sending a proportion of their grant money home to the family in Bangladesh.
Professor Stein and the academic who was to introduce him were already seated up on the podium when Jim and I came in. The podium took up the whole front of the theatre and was faced in the same dark brown wood as almost every other surface in sight. The overwhelming impression was one of enclosure and stultification. A dusty decanter of water and a cut-glass vase of wilted flowers stood on the podium table, behind which the Professor regarded the audience with mild, mournful brown eyes as if he were a cow with no milk to give. In the hard, cramped, tip-up seat I tried to compose myself for sleep.
The chairman rose to his feet. ‘Errumph … It’s er … 6.15 and it doesn’t look like we’ll have too many more people coming so I think we’ll make a start.’ My eyelids felt gummy and heavy. ‘Most of you are, no doubt, familiar with Professor Stein’s work. For those of you that aren’t I must apologise at this juncture. The Professor has asked me especially to refrain from a long recitation of his publications and the academic positions he has held and confine myself purely to those works that have a direct bearing on the lecture he is going to give us this evening. That being so, let it suffice for me to say that since Professor Stein retired from the chair here at the LSE some three years ago, he has spent the vast bulk of his time on organising, administering and teaching at the Centre for Millenarian Studies which he himself founded at Erith Marsh. His publications during this period have reflected his preoccupation with the coming end of our era; I refer to his paper “Wittgenstein and the Arterial Road System in the Southeast of England” and, of course, “Mirror Image: Reductive Cultural Identity in Late Twentieth-century Britain”, both published in the BJE2.
‘The occasion of this particular lecture is to give us all an opportunity to, as it were, preview Professor Stein’s new book Meaning and Millenarianism; and to hear from the author himself some of the arguments he puts forward in the book, in advance of its publication next week. I’d like to say at this juncture that there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of the lecture, but this period will of necessity be circumscribed as we need to clear the lecture theatre for the Students’ Drama Society, who, I believe, are rehearsing for a production of Oklahoma. Err … Professor Stein.’
The Professor mooched over to the lectern and stood for a while several feet behind it, regarding his audience with baleful eyes. I was shocked to see that he was dressed rather nattily for an emeritus professor in a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. He was also quite a bit more virile in appearance than I had at first supposed. Although over sixty his hair was still intact and ungreying, his jaw was set and two veins rode up his temples and seemed to visibly throb in the wan light of the lecture theatre. He hovered over the lectern as a surgeon might an operating table. He carried no notes.
‘Picture the future. Picture it like this.’ His voice was sonorous, insistent and persuasive, more spiritual than academic. ‘An orderly phalanx of flagellants some four hundred in number march down off the Marylebone Flyover. They chastise themselves with the precise, timed strokes of their leather lashes. They take up the entire inside lane of the road. The chastisement is considered and vicious. Each stroke on each back brings forth blood, which spatters the windscreens of the cars that are backed up in the two offside lanes, all the way from Lisson Grove. The morning air is full of a pink, frothy spray as the passive commuters put on their water jets and windscreen wipers in an attempt to stop their windscreens coagulating.
‘Or, if you prefer, picture this: Speaker’s Corner is in full swing on a Sunday afternoon. There are the usual crop of eccentrics — cranks and people with extreme political views — but on this Sunday, to their chagrin, they are wholly eclipsed by bands of ragged men and women wearing filthy grey shifts. These people move among the crowds enjoining them to enter a state of grace immediately and to throw off the restrictive chains of mere human morality.
‘ “Rejoice! We are already saved!” they cry. They shamelessly roll on the ground, fighting, copulating, and drinking to prove their point. Together with other adherents they are forming a secessionist commune in Hyde Park, dedicated to the anticipation of the Apocalypse.
‘Can you picture this? Or is it beyond your comprehension?’ Stein paused and raked his meditative gaze over the darkened theatre. I could imagine it all right, I was rapt. I hadn’t expected anything like this. Jim was clearly imagining it too, he sat hunched forward on his seat, panting. I looked round the rest of the audience: the octogenarians still slept, the perpetual students took notes. Stein continued, ‘My purpose in this lecture is to briefly outline the central argument of my forthcoming book. Obviously time will mean that this outline will be incomplete, but nonetheless I hope to make it reasonably clear that the kind of scenarios that I just asked you to envisage are not accurate predictions of the way millenarianism will affect the populations of Western societies as we move towards the third era since the death of the Christ-figure. These things may have occurred in the past, but I believe that there are now certain overriding factors that make a recurrence of such phenomena distinctly unlikely …’
And there I lost him. The rest of the lecture became increasingly involved, turgid and difficult to follow. Stein didn’t help matters by continually digressing from his central argument in order to inveigh against other academics in the same field. The digressions themselves had digressions. As far as I could gather they related specifically to the difficulties involved in the exegesis of certain recondite texts, penned in the closing years of the ninth century by monks scattered across Europe. Stein raised his voice, he moved out from behind the lectern and came to the front of the stage, as if intending to embrace his audience like an ageing singer having a Las Vegas comeback.
For me, it was all to no avail. The sheer weight of detail eroded my attention. His digressions began to resolve themselves into a series of Post-it notes stuck fluttering in my mind … I began to tune out. When I tuned back in again it was 6.50 and Stein was summing up.
‘… To sum up: The existence of the possibility of the destruction of the world by men themselves, in a number of different forms — nuclear war, ecological disaster, man-made pandemics — means that although in a sense we live in a time that is more acutely aware than ever before of the possibility of some form of the Apocalypse, nonetheless that Apocalypse is no longer in any sense evidence of the immanent; it is merely possibly imminent. In the past, the ending of an era, or even a century, was viewed with great fear and a spontaneous move towards salvation in one form or another, a move that can only be understood solidly in the context of the Judaeo-Christian cultural dialectic. The end of this current era will, I believe, be met with at worst indifference and at best with some quite good television retrospectives.’