When in the Future They Look Back on Us Summary and Analysis

Doris Lessing's Prisons We Choose to Live Inside is the text of five interrelated speeches given in 1985 by the then-famed English writer, who receives the Nobel Prize for Literature more than two decades later. The speeches are solicited for an annual Canadian series of talks by prominent thinkers on topics of widespread, contemporary interest. Lessing's addresses, and the subsequent book, concern the failure of humans to properly use accumulated wisdom about the past and about individual and group behavior to create more peaceful and kinder societies. The book's first section, "When in the Future They Look Back on Us," is preceded by short quotes from three nineteenth-century men: the poet and dramatist, Friedrich Hebbel; the Austrian statesman, Wenzel Lothar Metternich; and the American jurist Oliver...