What We Can Know

In the year 2119, a scholar named Thomas Metcalfe travels to the Bodleian Snowdonia Library (formerly part of Oxford) to conduct research on the life of a poet named Francis Blundy, whose life bridged the 20th and 21st centuries. At the library, Thomas is assisted by an archivist named Donald Drummond. Drummond wants to collaborate with Thomas on his research project, but Thomas is annoyed by him.

Thomas revisits the journals kept by Francis’s wife, Vivien Blundy, who indicated that she and Francis were happy after her first marriage to a man named Percy Greene. Toward the end of his life, Greene had Alzheimer’s disease, and Vivien made attempts to become a scholar but ended up abandoning her career to support Francis in his own.

In anticipation of her 54th birthday in October 2014, Vivien prepared to throw a dinner party at the farmhouse (referred to as the Barn) where she lived with Francis. This dinner would retroactively be called the Second Immortal Dinner (a reference to the Immortal Dinner of 1817, held in the house of painter Ben Haydon), in which Francis read the only known copy of his now-lost poem