Time Travel. A History

In the twentieth century the physicists took the moral lead—they had the power—and the philosophers mainly reacted or resisted. After Einstein’s message sank in, metaphysicians began to say without blushing that time and space have the same “ontological standing,” that they exist “in the same way.” As for poets, they lived in the same world, pulled the same tiles from the bag, and knew better than to trust all the words. Proust searching for lost time. Woolf stretching and warping it. Joyce assimilating the news about time as it came from the frontier of science. “Temporal or spatial,” says Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it.” No, it is not. Later came Ulysses,

the book of a single day, exodus and return. “An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.” Leopold Bloom worries about magnetism and time, the sun and the stars, pulling and being pulled: “Very strange about my watch. Wristwatches are always going wrong.” Oh, there was unease.

Not everyone liked T. S. Eliot’s last long poem, Four Quartets, published from 1936 to 1942. Some accused it of self-parodic inscrutability. Not everyone thought it was a poem about time, but it is. Here the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual, / Here the past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled.

Does all time exist together? Is the future already contained in the past? Didn’t Einstein say so?

Along with quite a few of his contemporaries, Eliot was influenced by a slightly crackpot book, An Experiment with Time, written by an Irish aeronautical pioneer named John William Dunne. Dunne was an acquaintance of Wells who at the turn of the century began building aircraft models, then gliders, then powered biplanes, all tailless (a design with stability problems). In the twenties, having left aeronautics behind, he noticed that his dreams sometimes predicted future events. They were “precognitive dreams,” he decided. Reverse memory. He had dreamed of a volcano killing four thousand on a French island and then, later (or so he recalled), read in the newspaper of the Pelée eruption on Martinique, killing forty thousand. He began keeping a notebook and pencil under his pillow; he interviewed his friends about their dreams; and he put two and two together. By 1927 he had a theory and a book.

Dunne proposed to replace the foundations of epistemology with his new system. “If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.” The past and the future coexist, in “the time dimension.” Incidentally, he wrote, he had stumbled upon “the first scientific argument for human immortality.” He put forward not a four-dimensional but a five-dimensional view of space and time. In explaining this, he adverted to Einstein and Minkowski and, as another authority, to Mr. H. G. Wells, who “through the mouth of one of his fictional characters, stated his case with a clearness and conciseness which has rarely, if ever, been surpassed.”

Wells himself did not approve. He assured Dunne that “prevision” was claptrap and that time traveling was make-believe—“that I [Dunne] have taken something which he never intended to be treated seriously…and have brooded too much upon it.” But Eliot and other literary searchers absorbed Dunne’s provocative ideas and imagery, including the prospect of a kind of immortality. The future is a faded song, Eliot writes. The way up is the way down

(another fragment from Heraclitus), and the way forward is the way back. He has sensed that all time is eternally present, but he is not sure.^*3 If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.