by Eric Bies
There may be no concept so alluring in all of science fiction than that of time travel. We are undoubtedly drawn to alien species and places in space—moons to colonize, asteroids to mine. But even freakish beings and far-off worlds, however remote, have always smacked a little too much of our own reality. I’m fully capable, after all, of walking from my apartment to the park. I can sit on a bench and read National Geographic. What I can’t do (and have an immensely difficult time imagining ever being able to do, so that the notion borders on fantasy) is step outside and arrive at yesterday.
And yet how many of us wish we could!
The more melancholy among us, given to regret, get stuck in the mud of wishing just that. (And the reasons, from finance to romance, could occupy an entire essay of their own.) But how many of us at the same time wish to know, for the sheer fun of finding out, whether Jesus Christ had curly hair or straight? (My bet is he was bald.) Yes, who else but we the hopelessly curious can be depended on to investigate, if one day someone does invent a time machine, who Jack the Ripper was, whether there ever was a warrior-king called Odysseus, and what Cleopatra and T-Rexes really looked like?
Here’s another mission: Go back to 1880, clap a beard on your face, stump down to the British Library, and ask one of the assistants to judge whether the name of John Ruskin, the most eminent English writer then living, will remain recognizable to readers in the year 2020. Of course, this is something like surmising today Brad Pitt’s popularity in 2160: if we wish to know, it’s because we can’t, and so we ask: Does one future grow any less certain the more certain than others it seems? Is there some universal law that invites expectation only to subvert it?
Well, no one does read Ruskin anymore. But then, no one reads most writers anymore, and maybe with good reason. Sci-fi titan Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90% of everything is junk (and who reads him anymore?). But even those whose works have been sufficiently fashionable to command multiple print runs, strangers neither to praises nor prizes, even these authors have been largely left unread, unpondered, undiscussed, and thereby forgotten. Who remembers Booth Tarkington? And how many ironies can we trace to this phenomenon? Ruskin’s own century produced two of the most notable examples in Vincent van Gogh and Herman Melville: hopeless losers to the end, they perished a year apart, all but penniless and practically nameless, only to carve out their immortalizing trajectories from beyond the grave. Or consider the fate of Samuel Johnson, that august giant of English letters renowned not only for compiling the first English dictionary but also for single-handedly editing and annotating the complete works of Shakespeare. We rarely speak of the man now except in connection with his friend and biographer, James Boswell, whose singular Life of Johnson must easily outsell whatever of the Johnson corpus remains in print. What happens when the Life overshadows the life?
A couple of years ago I stumbled on a strange little book put out by those strange little people at Semiotext(e). The product of several decades of omnivorous reading, French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces is a book unlike any other. Published in 2004, here for the first time was a thorough inventory of all the artistic productions we do not have—Lefebvre’s personal mausoleum of lost things—a kind of global catalogue raisonné of nonexistence. From manuscripts in suitcases and vanishing canvases to imaginary songs and underground film reels, each item has been lost and never found: some incinerated, others stolen, confiscated, or simply misplaced. Lefebvre establishes his taste for the distinctive disappearance as early as the fifth entry, which, squished between a verse drama by Heinrich von Kleist (burnt to ashes) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Journal (“destroyed by her mother”), is announced almost in the matter of old milk cartons:
MISSING, the poems of Robert Creeley, which littered the hardwood floor of Brautigan’s house in Bolinas, on drunken nights; Brautigan would gather them in the morning and put them in a bowl on the piano, “for posterity,” he’d say.
Lefebvre adds much that is tantalizing and phantasmal (think Bruno Schulz’s rumored masterwork, The Messiah) and more that went the way of unfulfillment (so that we ache anew for the finished triptych of Gogol’s Dead Souls). He also adds actual people, proposing cutouts of J. D. Salinger, who disappeared in 1959, and Peter Handke, who, in the author’s estimation, is just plain lost (and what has he lost? his heart? his soul? his mind?).
Of all that one can lose idiomatically (sleep, ground, track of this or that), it’s the irretrievable loss of days and years, by which we most deeply feel our finitude, that makes stories of time travel so compelling. The classic of the genre, with its twist of inadvertence, has to be Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” the story of a man who gets so drunk he spends twenty years sleeping it off. (More shocking than the growth of his beard after waking is the fact that his crowned sovereign has been supplanted by a president!) In “The Dream of a Summer Day,” Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of a classic Japanese folktale, a fisherboy’s accidental voyage into the future begins just as innocently:
After long waiting, Urashima caught something, and drew it up to him. But he found it was only a tortoise…. Now a tortoise is sacred to the Dragon God of the Sea, and the period of its natural life is a thousand—some say ten thousand—years. So that to kill it is very wrong. The boy gently unfastened the creature from his line, and set it free, with a prayer to the gods.
It’s warm, quiet, and peaceful on the open sea, and before long Urashima falls asleep in his boat. Then, a beautiful girl, rising like Aphrodite from the foam, glides over and taps him on the shoulder. “Do not be surprised,” she says. “My father, the Dragon King of the Sea, sent me to you, because of your kind heart. For to-day you set free a tortoise. And now we will go to my father’s palace in the island where summer never dies; and I will be your flower-wife if you wish; and we shall live there happily forever.”
Urashima agrees (mostly because he’s never seen anyone nearly so beautiful), journeys to the Sea God’s palace, gets married, and lives like a prince. For three years straight, life beneath the Sea God’s roof proves to be a series of uninterrupted pleasures, until the inevitable happens: his humanity intrudes. Like Lot’s wife, like Orpheus, like anyone who’s longed to look back for a moment, Urashima realizes he feels guilty for abandoning his parents and his village. Much to his wife’s concern, he decides to visit them one last time.
Again at last he glided into his native bay;—again he stood upon its beach. But as he looked, there came upon him a great bewilderment,—a weird doubt.
For the place was at once the same, and yet not the same. The cottage of his fathers had disappeared. There was a village; but the shapes of the houses were all strange, and the trees were strange, and the fields, and even the faces of the people. Nearly all remembered landmarks were gone;—the Shintō temple appeared to have been rebuilt in a new place; the woods had vanished from the neighboring slopes. Only the voice of the little stream flowing through the settlement, and the forms of the mountains, were still the same. All else was unfamiliar and new. In vain he tried to find the dwelling of his parents; and the fisherfolk stared wonderingly at him; and he could not remember having ever seen any of those faces before.
There came along a very old man, leaning on a stick, and Urashima asked him the way to the house of the Urashima family.
“Urashima Taro!” The old man laughs; he can’t help it. “You must be joking! Everyone knows the story of the fisherboy who, four hundred years ago, drowned while fishing at sea!”
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Image credit: “Lost” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.