Time Travel. A History

It was not just a matter of minutes and hours. The days and the years, too, confounded a world whose farthest parts were now in close communication. When, finally, would humanity agree on a uniform calendar? The new League of Nations took up the question after World War I. Its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation chose the philosopher Bergson as its president; another member, briefly, was Einstein. The League tried to impose the Gregorian calendar, itself the product of centuries of strife and revision, on nations less concerned with computing the proper dates of Easter feasts. The prospect of leaping forward or back in time created anxiety. Those nations did not fall in line. Bulgarians and Russians complained that their citizens could not be made suddenly to age by thirteen days, to surrender thirteen days of their lives in the name of globalization. Conversely, when France condescended to join Greenwich time, the Parisian astronomer Charles Nordmann said, “Some people may have consoled themselves with the reflection that to grow younger by 9 minutes and 21 seconds, on the authority of the law, was a pleasure worth having.”

Had time become a thing over which dictators and kings could exercise power? “The Problem of Summer Time” is the English title of a new sort of time-travel story, published in 1943 by a darkly satirical Parisian writer, Marcel Aymé. In French it is “Le décret”—The Decree—issued after scientists and philosophers discover how easy it is to advance the time an hour forward each summer and back again each winter. “Little by little,” says the narrator, “the realization spread that time was under man’s control.” Humans are time’s dynamic masters: they may hurry up or slow down to suit themselves. Anyway “the old, stately pace was over.”

There was much talk of relative time, physiological time, subjective time and even compressible time. It became obvious that the notion of time, as our ancestors had transmitted it down the millennia, was in fact absurd claptrap.

With time now seemingly at their command, the authorities see a way to escape the nightmare of a war that seemed endless. They decide to advance the years by seventeen: 1942 leaps forward to 1959. (In the same spirit, moviemakers in Hollywood began to tear pages from calendars and spin the hands of clocks so as to move time along for their viewers.) The decree makes the world and all its people seventeen years older. The war has come to an end. Some have died, others have been born, and everyone has some catching up to do. It’s all rather disorienting.

Aymé’s narrator travels from Paris by railroad into the countryside. A surprise awaits him there. Apparently the decree has not spread everywhere. A storm, some wine, a troubled sleep, and in a distant village he encounters active German soldiers, and, sure enough, the mirror now shows him the thirty-nine-year-old he was, not the fifty-six-year-old he had become. On the other hand, he still has his newly acquired memories of those seventeen years. This is disturbing—indeed, impossible. “To be from an era, I thought, is to behold the world and oneself in a certain way that belongs to that era.” Is he fated to relive the same life, burdened with memories of times to come?

He feels the existence of two parallel worlds, seventeen years apart yet existing simultaneously. Worse, after these “mysterious leaps and turns through time,” why should there be only two?

Now I accepted the nightmare of an infinity of universes, in which the official time represented only the relative displacement of my consciousness from one to another, and then on to another.

Now— and now— and then another now.

Three o’clock—I am aware of the world in which I feature holding a pen. Three o’clock and one second—I am aware of the next universe in which I feature putting down my pen, etc.

It’s too much for the human mind to comprehend; mercifully, his memories begin to fade, as all memories do. What he has written of the past—the future, and then the past—begins to seem like a dream. “Only once in a while, more and more infrequently, do I have the very ordinary sensation of déjà vu.”

What is memory, for a time traveler? A conundrum. We say that memory “takes us back.” Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress “and a capricious one at that.” (“Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.”)

“I can’t remember things before they happen,” says Alice, and the Queen retorts, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Memory both is and is not our past. It is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade. If the time traveler meets herself, who remembers what, and when?

In the twenty-first century the paradoxes of memory grow more familiar. Steven Wright remarks: “Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”