Recently I have been dipping into two series that both involved time travel and it got me thinking about the large number of books, series, and movies that involve time travel directly, alternate timelines, or time loops. Stories often have a mixture of these when they change the past, whether accidental or intentional.
You can see some of these elements in Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol”, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Groundhog’s Day”, “Back to the Future” series, “12 Monkeys”, “The Terminator,” series, etc. What I was thinking about specifically is why the subject is so interesting and what draws us most to these stories?
There are varied reasons that these plotlines, when done well, can be so compelling. For one, there is a fragility of events in our lives that could have gone otherwise. We have the intuition that we are not just acting out a scripted existence and so many details could have gone otherwise.
“Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.” (G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”, “IV The Ethics of Elfland”)
It is also intellectually fun to play with time travel paradoxes, although why your poor grandfather might be the target of such paradoxes is another story.
For me, the fascination with such plots is the idea of going back in time to prevent myself from taking trouble-filled paths in my life. I have day-dreamed about being able to tell my 18-year-old (or younger) self that most things I believed were false. Such a tempting daydream to remove all the wrinkles out of your lived experienced and thinking you would come out of this the person you want to be. This daydream would be endlessly recursive because there are things I would argue with my previous self just six months back in time.
The problem is you can end up in a recrimination time loop, always revisiting and lamenting your past actions. Even worse, if you are constantly blaming others, and that everything would be perfect otherwise. There is wisdom in knowing yourself, and even more reason when you realize how little you know yourself.
The other factor is discovering how our woundedness and the woundedness of others have shaped us. The meaning and role of suffering in our lives. As Peter Kreeft likes to note, “Rabbi Abraham Heschel says, ‘The man who has never suffered—what could he possibly know, anyway?’” I recently read Joseph Pearce’s revised authorized biography of Solzhenitsyn, and this was something Solzhenitsyn came to realize and that his time in the gulag was transformative for him. He became thankful for this suffering as he reflected on how he had previously ignored the surrounding problems to prefer an ideology over the effects of that ideology.
“But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Time travel related stories give us an “if only” to do a past patch up. Much harder is living in the present moment and learning from our past sins. As Catholics, to accept the forgiveness of our sins in the Sacrament of Confession. To spend too much time regretting the past and fretting the future gets us nowhere. We are called to love right now!
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” (G. K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg,” Tremendous Trifles)
Another factor for me in this was today’s First Reading at Mass:
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. (James 4:13–17)
