The manuscript lies open at a chapter entitled "The Future."
Several pages have acquired folded corners.
No one is prepared to admit whose.
Blottisham: I have discovered something rather disappointing.
Quillibrace: About the future?
Blottisham: About strategic plans.
The manuscript claims they exist less to predict the future than to coordinate the present.
Surely that can't be right.
Quillibrace: Why not?
Blottisham: Because a strategic plan concerns the future.
It's there in the name.
Quillibrace: Is it?
Or is it perhaps an agreement about what people shall begin doing on Monday?
(A pause.)
Stray: That's rather good.
The future itself doesn't attend planning meetings.
Only the present does.
Blottisham: Then why not call them present plans?
Quillibrace: Because no one would fund them.
(They laugh.)
Stray: The manuscript says something quite beautiful.
"Human beings cooperate remarkably well with events that have not yet occurred."
Blottisham: That's called optimism.
Quillibrace: No.
Optimism concerns outcomes.
This concerns coordination.
Children are educated for futures they will inhabit decades later.
Trees are planted.
Bridges are designed.
Libraries are founded.
None of these activities would make much sense if everyone insisted upon remaining in the present.
Blottisham: So civilisation depends upon imagination.
Quillibrace: Shared imagination.
One person's imagined future is eccentric.
Several million people's imagined future becomes infrastructure.
(A thoughtful silence.)
Stray: That's extraordinary.
Infrastructure is collective imagination that has acquired concrete.
Quillibrace: Miss Stray...
I suspect that sentence may survive the afternoon.
(They smile.)
Blottisham: But predictions are often wrong.
Quillibrace: Frequently.
Blottisham: Doesn't that undermine the whole enterprise?
Quillibrace: Not in the least.
A calendar may fail to predict the weather.
It nevertheless remains useful for arranging lunch.
Blottisham: That's infuriatingly reasonable.
Quillibrace: I have been practising.
Stray: The manuscript also says people rarely need accurate futures.
They need shared futures.
Blottisham: Surely accuracy matters.
Quillibrace: Immensely.
But coordination frequently arrives first.
A bridge cannot be built if every engineer is imagining a different bridge.
Stray: So the future is partly a meeting place.
Quillibrace: Precisely.
An imaginary location at which present actions agree to encounter one another.
(A silence.)
Blottisham: That's rather poetic.
Quillibrace: Entirely accidental.
(They continue reading.)
Blottisham: Here's an observation I don't understand.
"The future is administratively inhabited."
What on earth does that mean?
Quillibrace: Pension funds.
School curricula.
Building regulations.
Insurance.
Research grants.
Urban planning.
Every Tuesday afternoon.
Blottisham: Every Tuesday afternoon?
Quillibrace: A surprising proportion of civilisation consists of people quietly arranging tomorrow.
Stray: Long before tomorrow has agreed to cooperate.
Quillibrace: Indeed.
Tomorrow has always been rather independent-minded.
(A pause.)
Blottisham: Then perhaps hope is really an administrative activity.
(Quillibrace looks at him over his glasses.)
Quillibrace: My dear Blottisham...
that may be the most alarming sentence you have ever produced.
Blottisham: Is it wrong?
Quillibrace: Not entirely.
Which is considerably more worrying.
(The room falls quietly silent.)
Stray: I think the manuscript admires this.
It doesn't laugh at people for planning.
It laughs gently at the confidence with which each generation imagines its particular future to be the obvious one.
Quillibrace: Yes.
Every generation eventually discovers that the future has been making plans of its own.
(Another silence.)
Blottisham: It occurs to me...
perhaps civilisation is simply humanity's longest conversation with tomorrow.
(Quillibrace closes the manuscript.)
Quillibrace: If so...
it is one of the few conversations in which the final participant has never yet arrived.
The discussion concluded after an extended disagreement over whether the College's Five-Year Strategic Vision should be regarded as a forecast, an aspiration, or an unusually optimistic filing system.
The document was unanimously renewed for a further five years.
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