Raymond; Or, Life and Death: With Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death.

In the winter of 1915, Captain Raymond Lodge, twenty-three years old, was killed by a shell fragment in France. His father, the eminent physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, refused to accept this as an ending. Raymond is both a father's mournful tribute to a brilliant young man taken by war and a desperate intellectual's attempt to pierce the veil of death. The book interweaves Raymond's own letters from the trenches, vivid, humorous, tinged with the premonitions of a man who knew he was living on borrowed time, with the elder Lodge's spiritualist investigations. Here is a scientist using the tools of reason to pursue the irrational: seances, mediums, the trembling table, the fading voice from beyond. What emerges is neither proof nor fraud but something more human: a father's inability to let go. Raymond endures as a document of grief stripped of pretense, a wartime memoir that refuses the consolations of silence. It is for readers who want to understand what happens when a rational mind meets irreducible loss, and finds not answers but only the terrible, beautiful persistence of love.