FROM THE ARCHIVES: APRIL 26th, 1973Claud Cockburn was a radical English journalist, sometime communist, and creator of an anti-fascist newsletter, The Week, in the 1930s. He moved with his family to Cork in the late 1940s and wrote a weekly column in The Irish Timesin the 1970s, mainly dealing with international affairs, although this item in today's column in 1973 dealt with a different phenomenon. – JOE JOYCE
ALMOST EVERY time there is an air crash some friend or relative of one of the victims announces that he or she had a distinct vision of the crash days or weeks before it happened and warned people not to take the trip.
I always hope that I shall not be given any such warning. For the simple reason that while I would feel foolish if I were to take it seriously enough to cancel my ticket, I would feel almost equally foolish were I to disregard it.
This is one of the awkward dilemmas which our knowledge of extra-sensory perception and pre-cognition have introduced into our lives.
Naturally there are people who, on the general assumption that all air travel is terribly dangerous, have visions of the crash of any plane in which friends or loved ones are due to travel. The same phenomenon was often noticed in the early days of railways.
This pre-cognition is often confused with the sense of déjà vu -- the sensation a lot of people have a lot of the time that what they are seeing or doing is something they have seen or done before.
I am talking about an episode, or situation, which you see in clear detail, which is the result of factors of which you could not possibly have known, and which you record -- in writing or conversation – at the time. And a year or two years later the thing happens.
In the winter of 1928, I was living in a half ruined studio at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburban hill just south of Paris.
Being a student, with almost no money and no prospects that would convince the most optimistic of bankers or other moneylenders, I naturally had to spend a good deal of time trying to forget that I was hungry. In daylight one could read, or write. But very early in the evening the landlord used to cut off the light, fearing – rightly – that I would be unable to pay for it.
So I used sit looking out over Paris and writing in my head short stories: short stories which used to merge into a kind of waking dream.
In the course of one of these stories, which seemed to me quite conscious constructions, I wrote in my head that Ramsey MacDonald, British Labour leader, had become Prime Minister and had been invited to the United States to confer with President Hoover. I envisaged a vivid moment in New York City. The socialist Prime Minister, waving a top hat, was driving past Wall Street, greeting the crowds. And these stockbrokers and their clerks, thronging the sidewalks were shouting “Good old Ramsey, good old Ramsey Mac”.
Next day, thinking I might possibly develop this notion in some comical or satiric story of the future, I jotted down the details. A little less than a year later I had unexpectedly become a newspaper correspondent in New York. And I stood on the corner of Wall Street and lower Broadway, witnessing precisely that scene.
There was Ramsey Mac Donald waving his silk hat, there were the crowds just as I had seen them in that Paris studio.
Ramsey MacDonald really was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and he really was on his way to visit President Hoover. Yet, when I wrote that story in my head, or day-dreamed it, I had absolutely no means of knowing that the Conservative Party was going to lose the General Election of 1929.
I could not have advance knowledge of a situation in which the British socialist Prime Minister was going to be invited to visit the President of the United States. And at that time I had no notion at all of the train of events which was going to get me the job I had a year later, there in New York.
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