interfering with the flight of time

“Interfering with the flight of time” is the phrase through which T. H. White’s reading in psychology becomes a key to his imaginative reconstruction of himself. First encountered in a book on individual psychology, it takes on a second life in his writing: White turns backward time into both a figure for personal rebirth and the principle behind Merlyn’s unusual knowledge of the future.

The phrase in White’s reading

White’s shelves held books on human psychology, which he read, marked, and annotated. In Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology, he found a chapter on homosexuality that characterized homosexual people as wanting to interfere with time’s passage. Adler treated that desire as a refusal to develop into heterosexual adulthood; the account presents this as Adler’s theory, not as a conclusion independently established by the narrative.

The wording stayed with White. Its importance lies in the way it could be detached from Adler’s explanation and made to describe a larger imaginative movement. To interfere with time becomes, for White, not just to resist a prescribed path of development but to reverse the direction in which life is supposed to proceed.

Reversal and rebirth

The narrative connects this reversal to White’s experience after his struggle with Gos. He imagined the grave as a dissolution: he had lost his contest with the hawk, and the man he had been seemed to have died. Emerging from that symbolic death, he understood himself as reborn. He associated the change with St Lucy’s Day, the shortest and darkest day, after which the year turns back toward spring, and described life as finding an opening in chaos.

In this account, living backwards gives form to a change in identity. White’s imagined movement against time follows an experience in which the former self could no longer continue unchanged; what follows is not a return to that self, but the prospect of beginning again with wisdom. The phrase therefore joins personal crisis to a larger fantasy of renewal without claiming that the past can literally be undone.

Merlyn as White’s future self

White’s reversal finds a fictional embodiment in Merlyn. The wizard is born at the wrong end of time and lives backwards among people moving forwards. Because events that lie ahead for others have already happened in Merlyn’s life, his backward chronology supplies a narrative reason for his ability to predict the future.

The connection changes how Merlyn’s cottage and the objects in it can be read. White’s own belongings furnished the cottage in The Sword in the Stone, but the narrative also interprets the setting as belonging to Merlyn himself: its contents become souvenirs from the future. Merlyn is thus more than a literary invention assembled from the writer’s surroundings. He is White’s imagined future self, preserved in legend; the phrase about interfering with time names the imaginative bridge between White’s rebirth and that enduring fictional identity.