"The Door in the Wall" by H. G. Wells

As described in my January 31 post "The Door in the Wall," I recently reread Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception because of its possible relevance to the Green Door sync theme. Huxley several times uses the expression "Doors in the Wall," saying it is H. G. Wells's phrase, so that led me to download Wells's short story of that name. At that time, I had no idea that the story involved a door of any particular color, but less than 24 hours later, I received an email mentioning Wells's "The Door in the Wall" and that the door in it was green.

Yesterday, I finally got around to reading the story. Not only is the door green, its greenness is emphasized again and again; the phrase "green door" appears 12 times in a story of less than 7,000 words. In the story, a five-year-old boy happens upon a green door in a white wall and walks through it into a vast enchanted garden. He encounters various animals and people there -- most significantly, from the sync point of view, "very tame and friendly white doves" -- and a woman shows him a magical book in which he can see his own life. He turns the pages, seeing one episode after another up to the point where he opened the green door. When he tries to read beyond that point, he suddenly finds himself transported back into the ordinary world.

So there are two portals between the enchanted world and our own: a green door and a book. This ties in with the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman story "The Green Door," in which a girl steps through a green door and finds that she has traveled back into the past. There she eventually meets another modern who has traveled back in time. "Did you come through a little green door?" she asks. "No," he replies, "I came through a book."

Coming back to the Wells story, the child tries in vain to find the green door again, but later, throughout his life, he sees it again from time to time -- a green door in a white wall -- and knows that it will take him back to that enchanted garden. But each time he is busy or preoccupied or has something important to do, and he passes up his chance. He ends up having a very successful career in politics, but is tormented to the end with regret at having attained his success by sacrificing one opportunity after another to go back through the door.

A very unwelcome synchronicity: One of the occasions on which the green door appeared was "as I rushed to my father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative." As I read the story, my wife was out of town, having rushed to her father's bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Today she returned.