A new post after fifty billion years... about time travel.

This is an essay about time travel. It was supposed to be for a prompt in an application for the January Creative Writing Arts Intensive at Harvard, and then... morphed. And got away from me in the pleasant way writing does when you are enjoying it. It is also the first non-academic piece of writing I have produced in ages, and I felt like I wanted to share it somewhere. It is certainly nonacademic. And mostly, but not entirely, nonserious. So. Here it is!


Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? Why? What was there that interested you?

Author Chuck Klosterman, in his unreasonably serious essay on the cultural history and ethics of time travel, concludes that time travel is “the desire of the depressed and the lazy” – the hypothetical refuge of those who “would rather change every element of society except themselves.”¹ The desire for time travel, according to his thesis, is a desire for escape, compounded by a desire to have every element about oneself remain unchanged in the process. Barring the distinct (and exhaustively pondered) possibility of causing a catastrophic paradox, or accidentally trapping myself in the cruel embrace of a recursive time loop, I would absolutely love to travel in time. And I don't care if this makes me seem depressed or lazy.

The essence of time travel and its many cultural incarnations is the possibility of intervention—the chance to reverse or at least redirect the flow of life's events. And despite the potential for chaos contained in any active intervention, the notion of a panacea for regret, the chance to eliminate regret before it can develop, is a deeply compelling prospect. Given a handy time machine, perhaps contained in a retrofitted Delorean, I might never have done so much inappropriate vomiting in freshman year, or had my heart broken so many times. Disguised as my younger self, I could have corrected a variety of shattering mistakes; stopped up a number of ugly confessions before they were made; plucked the first cigarette from my younger self's hand and engaged in a lengthy, eloquent, and mind-bending anti-smoking PSA. And yet – despite the various iterations of trauma and chaos that have played their role in my life, regret is not sufficient motivation for me to embark upon the risky endeavor of time travel. Ultimately, the notion of correcting past mistakes is appealing, but not sufficient; I am cocky enough to conclude that my own repository of humiliating and unfortunate moments ultimately form part of a reasonably satisfactory present whole, and that my mistakes have not been catastrophic enough to upend my life in any permanent way as of yet.

There remain, however, a number of other options with regards to time travel. In order to consider them we must depart from the Back to the Future model (which postulates that problems with one's own present are imperative enough to justify potentially screwing the universe) and variants thereupon (such as Jack Finney's fantastic 1995 novel Time and Again, which depicts a secret government project that sends agents to make small but crucial interventions in the nation's past). There remains, however, the notion of traveling forward in time – seeing the future. In this tightly focused schematic of time travel, there could only be one goal in seeing the future—seeing one's future self (and, perhaps, changing one's present life accordingly).

As an early teenager, and in my first years of high school, there is no doubt I would have jumped (or even quantum jumped) at this chance. I spent many hours engaging in elaborate dialogues with my future self, many of which were focused around the theme of my college self having become a 24 Hour Party Person, or at least much closer to conventional notions of cool. There would be boyfriends (oh there would be boyfriends), some casual use of substances, and a variety of fantastically imagined friends, who managed to combine Ivy League smarts with the crass panache of rock musicians too cool to need to know how to play (here's looking at you, Sid Vicious). But now—having attained Ivy Leaguedom, but still at a distance from cool—I feel ambivalent about the goals of fourteen-year-old Talia. The notion that I would in many ways be a disappointment to my fourteen-year-old self is dispiriting, but not crushing; while I have rarely partied for more than, say, 5 hours in a given day (leaving a massive, 19-hour lacuna in my Party Person Status), I feel that I have discovered things in the world that my fourteen-year-old self was simply too young to know about. For example, I have learned to speak Russian and spent a total of four months in the Former Soviet Union since matriculating; this was something that fourteen-year-old me, or indeed freshman-year me, could not have anticipated. And while I imagine fourteen-year-old me would not be displeased at the sight of me, say, picking sunflowers in Moldova, she would no doubt question my continuing lack of sexual prowess, and/or lack of concretely measurable worldly success (I'm fairly certain I was supposed to have published a few novels by now... sorry, younger Talia). The result: I am forced to concede that my past self's expectations are not the best guidelines for my life's appropriate course in the present; and, therefore, that imposing twenty-two-year-old Talia's life values (or confusion) on the life of, say, forty-year-old Talia might face similar limitations. That life, as checkered with regret as it is, seems to be capable of granting enriching experience (or at least providing the space for self-education).

The only remaining truly desirable form of time travel, then, is one that totally transcends my own life. Woody Allen's recent movie Midnight in Paris follows the adventures of Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who displaces himself in present geography (moving to Paris from California), only to find himself mysteriously displaced in time (back to the Lost Generation's literary Paris). Despite sharing some themes with other cultural touchstones of time travel – most notably, the recurring trope of the time-traveling automobile, although this one is a neat vintage model complete with vintage drunken passengers-- Midnight In Paris has a different take on the purposes of time travel. True to Klosterman's notion of the self-congratulatory time traveler, Gil is transported without any particular mission, and the vague sense of dissatisfaction that is his animating feature remains unchanged. He moons around the picturesque streets of '20s Paris, and is, improbably, embraced by a broad swath of Paris's intellectual elite; Stein, Dali, Picasso and the Fitzgeralds, among others, weigh in on his mediocre novel and his inchoate, seemingly irresolvable life problems. Moreover, he allows himself to be lost in the bewitching gaze of Marion Cotillard, who, like him, is romantically obsessed with a previous time. Back in the future, he finds himself a footnote in the life of a footnote (Cotillard's character is briefly one of Picasso's many concubines; she writes in her journal about a “charming American” whose only salient features seem to be his soothing voice and continual air of confusion). Time travel, in Allen's conception, is little more than an extension of geographic tourism; like many members of the modern literary upper-middle class, Gil travels to discover an enduring truth about himself, with the aid of implausibly helpful natives. (In this case, the ultimate conclusion he draws is that his wife-to-be is kind of bitchy, and that love is easier in French.) For all its lush cinematography, Midnight in Paris is little more than the thinking man's “Eat, Pray, Love,” with a host of celebrity cameos you can actually feel good about, because the relevant parties have been dead for long enough to be chic again.

Perhaps because I am lucky enough to not be a Woody Allen character – as a female, I would no doubt be either a manic pixie or a shrill blonde-- my ideal time travel into the past would not involve such ahistoric machinations. I will confess I have fallen in love with times past. In particular, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century-- roughly 1890 to 1920-- have struck me over and over again as one of the most culturally fertile periods in the world's history. The seeds of a changed human existence were sown then; the Hebrew language was revived, in a strange time paradox of its very own; Dadaism and Surrealism flourished, as did their Fascist counterpart, Futurism, in an efflorescence of bizarre manifestos; the world erupted in a meaningless war and a proletarian revolution; and above all Europe was united in a prevailing and absolute faith in the power of ideas (although that power often turned out to be almost mind-bendingly evil). And yet—were I to travel back in time and observe my favorite era, one which I have obsessively studied over much of my educational career, I would not presume to talk to Tristan Tzara in person. I would not (though I would be tempted) break up the Paul Eluard-Gala Eluard-Salvador Dali love triangle and take one for myself. I would not seduce the Hebrew poet Shaul Tschernichovsky, no matter how appealing I currently find his moustache. Instead, I would like to be a mute observer, without participating in any way.

Unmoored in time, and existing before my own birth, I would be squarely in the yawning gap in human knowledge that precedes and follows the brief tenure of our lives. True to Klosterman's indictment, I would not significantly change any element about myself—but I wouldn't seek to change the society around me, either. Instead, I would seek a kind of self-erasure: paralyzed by the idea that any action of mine would have impossible, catastrophic ramifications, I would sink into that paralysis with the easy comfort of a dreamer. I would be a tourist that takes no pictures and has no conversations. I would not try to discover any enduring truth about myself or anybody else; I would not seek out the ultimate history "scoop," kick-starting a prominent academic career. I would try very hard not to catch diptheria, but otherwise would take no precautions at all. Slipping behind the wheel of my time vehicle of choice, I would fly back, back, back to a time before any choice I have ever made or will ever make could possibly matter. I would fly back to a time when everything I have ever loved to study was in a perfect state of irresolution. It would be like the small and inconsequential act of backwards time travel that occurs each time you watch a movie again, knowing the ending, but it would be my continual, all-enveloping present. It may very well be that a life of absolute nonintervention is the perfect refuge of the truly lazy. But I, the indolent, ponderous, perpetually yearning prospective time traveler, am perfectly OK with that.

1Klosterman, Chuck. “Tomorrow Rarely Knows.” Eating the Dinosaur. 2009.