Time Travel. A History

All these children—Cyril, Robert, Anthea, Jane, and the boy Sherman—want to go back and see the famous names enacting their famous stories. They serve as proxies for our desire to know what really happened. That desire seems to burn more fiercely when it is partially satisfied. The better that technology gets at capturing and representing our experience of the present, the more we suffer from the fog of ignorance that divides us from lost times. Progress in visualization shows us what we’re missing. In Nesbit’s time, statues and painted portraits were giving way to photographs. There was a magic in the way they froze an instant of time. Later, the dog Mr. Peabody was of course expert in the new medium of television. Nowadays every modern historian and biographer has felt the desire to send a video camera into the past—to Newton’s garden or King Arthur’s court—if an actual time machine is not available.

“I’ve always felt a wonder at old photographs,” says Simon Morley. He is a sketch artist, working in advertising in New York, and he is the narrator of Time and Again, a 1970 novel (illustrated with sketches and vintage photographs) by Jack Finney, a former New York ad man himself.^*5 Simon deeply feels the inaccessibility of the past, once alive, now lost, taunting us with the few objects and images that survive.

Maybe I don’t need to explain; maybe you’ll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.

It’s not just photographs. Someone appropriately sensitized, like Simon, can see the fingers of the past pressing through the cracks of all his existence. In a dense old city like New York, the past is in the stones and the bricks. The relic that triggers Simon’s time travels will turn out to be a residential building—not just any apartment house, but a famous one, the Dakota: “like a miniature town…gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, peaks…acres of slanted surfaces shingled in slate, trimmed with age-greened copper, and peppered with uncountable windows, dormer and flush; square, round, and rectangular; big and small; wide, and as narrow as archers’ slits.” This will be his portal.

The conceit of Time and Again is that time travel to the past can be accomplished with no machinery, no magic, but merely a trick of the mind, a bit of self-hypnosis. If the right subject, a sensitive person like Simon, can rid his memory and purge his surroundings of every trace of the past century, he can translate himself by an act of will into, for example, the year 1882. First he must get into the mood: “There are no such things as automobiles….There are no planes, computers, television, no world in which they are possible. ‘Nuclear’ and ‘electronics’ appear in no dictionary anywhere on the face of the earth. You have never heard the name Richard Nixon…or Eisenhower…Adenauer…Stalin…Franco…General Patton.”

Simon (and the reader) are also primed with the now-customary Wells-style pseudologic, to counter the commonsense knowledge that time travel is impossible. Once again, everything we think we know about time is wrong. Here, in 1970, the patter is updated to stand on the authority of Einstein. “How much do you know about Albert Einstein,” says Dr. E. E. Danziger, project director, in the role of learned gentleman. “The list of Einstein’s discoveries is a considerable one. But I’ll skip to this: Presently he said that our ideas about time are largely mistaken.” He explains:

“We’re mistaken in our conception of what the past, present and future really are. We think the past is gone, the future hasn’t yet happened, and that only the present exists. Because the present is all we can see.”

“Well, if you pinned me down [says Simon], I’d have to admit that that’s how it seems to me.”

He smiled. “Of course. To me, too. It’s only natural. As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there.”

“Did he mean that literally, though? Or did he mean—”

Good question. Did he mean it literally, or was he merely creating an effective mathematical model? No matter. We’re moving quickly now, because Danziger has done Einstein one better and invented a way to step out of the boat and walk back.