Some Time Ago

January 18, 2023

I have been doing a clearance of some old writings I have on my hard drive. I am putting some of it up on the net. This is something I did for a creative writing class when asked to write something about time travel. It is a little dated, but that is appropriate given its subject, and I think it is worth a read.

Journeying Through Time

People of my time talk much of ‘time travel.’ The idea is not altogether far-fetched, for many among the wisest physicists of my time assert that, if indeed time and space are elastic, and they can show many proofs, empirical as well as abstract, that they are, then to move backward and forward within time is at least a theoretical possibility.
This is unfortunate in two ways for; whatever mankind can do, she will do, most often to her grief, and the possible consequences of time travel may be grievious beyond repair, and can bring no benefit to her; and as well, the popular imagination is excited to many forms of folly.
At its most benign, it inspires many popular entertainments: one may let the television create within one’s mind a journey, through a muddled simulation of Classical Greece, with Zena, the war-making lady; or one may lend the mind to a voyage upon the good ship Enterprise through the fantastic future, optimistically conceived, of Mr. Roddenberry. Yet this forms in simple minds an idea that time travel would be a mere adventure, a holiday in history.
As the promotions for the ‘interactive’ computerized entertainments shout: “ could you survive the voyage to Botany Bay with the first convict settlers?” or, “ could you live the life of a Cro-magnon man?” What is not realized is that one would not passively observe time travel, or ‘interact’ with it, that it would not be a virtual reality that could be switched off should it become too intense for our liking; it would be reality, and there may be no escape from it.

“Aye, ye scurvid gallows bait, heavy irons upon ye, and into a dark ship’s hold, banged up tight with others of yer ilk, there to abide on biscuit and rob for upward of a year’s duration. Did ye survive that, ye damned fool? Then live on to toil as a slave in Van Dieman’s land, under the tropic sun and The Cat, in a land uninhabitable to all but the meanest savage, and thus offering no escape, until death or the passing of your sentence free ye. Now, tell us what crime ye imagine for thyself, that ye would have thyself punished so?”

“Mammoth! Many mammoth come through pass. There, old one at edge of herd; get close, strike, dodge tusk and foot. Now, follow through tiaga; close, strike, dodge, follow, close, strike again, many days over snow, prey weakens, close in for kill; make sledge, drive off the great hyena, drag home to fire, to woman; ah, many days meat, many days, live to see spring come again.”

Many who would travel in time claim more elevated motives. Some would conduct their researches in the past: on the physiology of the dinosaurs, or on the matter between Bolivar and San Martin within the tent at Cajamarca. Yet how could such information help us in the present?
Some fools believe that, knowing the past, we might travel to a specific place and time, and alter history in order to improve the present, flattering themselves to be so surpassingly wise as to know; first, how the present should be, and second, what small detail out of infinite reality would, if altered, produce the desired result.
I have a friend who is convinced that both Trotsky and The Revolution were indeed betrayed by Stalin. He sincerely believes that if someone had assassinated this villain in 1924, the bolshevik revolution would have achieved its promise, and that he, and I, and all our contemporaries would now live in the stateless utopia predicted by Marx.
However, I have read some histories of the Bolshevik movement myself, including one that examines it as part of a study of the psychology of revolutionary movements, rather than from a doctrine of inevitable triumph, either of the working ‘class,’ or of the free market ‘system.’ Trotsky and his faction were inadequate as leaders of a state for; while he had many theories, which continue to impress some scholars of political science, he had few ideas that were of practical benefit to the peoples of the new Soviet Union, given their circumstances at the time; and so power passed to the practical but ruthless men who had risen during the revolution, and Stalin prevailed.
Now, had some terminator been misguidedly sent back through time to end Stalin’s life, and to save the career of Trotsky, it would likely have achieved only the ascension of someone as bad as Stalin or worse, if that were possible. We might amuse ourselves by speculating as to how this might effect the events of history from that point forward, but we shall never know. Indeed, it might produce a chain of causation that results in us never existing.
This law of unimaginable consequences applies as well to the future; if we debark from our time ship to find that the Borg, or merely the trilateral commission, have prevailed, how then? To attempt to journey in time would be to extend man’s impulse to confound nature, bringing ever greater troubles upon himself, into a new dimension.
Yet we are all time travellers, the hardy Cro-magnon as much as those yet unborn, upon our limited tracks, for though the arrogant may believe that time ends when they die, for they no longer observe it, the wise know that it is we who end, and time goes on, and we must be content with our short journey, even if it leads us through, as the saying goes, ‘exciting times.’
It has been my fate to live, as I grow older, in ever more exciting times, in which the atom weapon has been displaced, as the dark cloud over the future, by the ancient evil of usury, which rises out of the corruption and fall of an old order, as do maggots from a corpse, and which, by the quickening of the sciences, is greatly accelerated in ushering the death of the old, and the birth of some new order, but is also more speeded in the ravaging of the earth’s bounty, which bodes to straiten any emergent order; the children pauperised by the profligacy of the parents.
It is of value in such an age to time travel in one’s imagining; to think of the people of past ages, who have lived through times when it must have seemed that time itself was ending: in the years of the Black Death, or of the coming of the Conquistador; to put our own troubles into perspective, and to put ourselves into the minds of such people, at that ecstatic moment when the light broke on the horizon, and they realized that they had survived the worst, and would go forward from there, for we can gain a resiliency of spirit from this common memory of humanity that is history. However, to desire to live in some other time and place than one’s own, is second only to wishing to be someone else, as a pathetic delusion of those who are unable to deal with the troubles of their own life and times.
finem habeo