The Unknown Guest (Annotated)

First published in 1914, “The Unknown Guest” is a book about death and the after-life by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck.

Chapters include: Phantasms Of The Living And The Dead; Psychometry; The Knowledge Of The Future; The Elberfeld Horses; and, The Unknown Guest.

Excerpt from the Introduction to “The Unknown Guest”:

“My Essay on Death led me to make a conscientious enquiry into the present position of the great mystery, an enquiry which I have endeavored to render as complete as possible. I had hoped that a single volume would be able to contain the result of these investigations, which, I may say at once, will teach nothing to those who have been over the same ground and which have nothing to recommend them except their sincerity, their impartiality and a certain scrupulous accuracy. But, as I proceeded, I saw the field widening under my feet, so much so that I have been obliged to divide my work into two almost equal parts. The first is now published and is a brief study of veridical apparitions and hallucinations and haunted houses, or, if you will, the phantasms of the living and the dead; of those manifestations which have been oddly and not very appropriately described as "psychometric"; of the knowledge of the future: presentiments, omens, premonitions, precognitions and the rest; and lastly of the Elberfeld horses...”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was born in Ghet, Belgium, into a prosperous Francophone Catholic family. Maeterlinck was closely associated with the French literary movement of symbolism, which used symbols to represent ideas and emotions. The author of more than 60 books replete with suggestions of universal mystery and auras of impending doom, Maeterlinck's work as a whole can be read as a symbolist manifesto. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.