Samiul Bashar Samin
What would you do if you could choose any time period to live in?
It’s interesting to think about, but it’s also a stalling tactic I’m using, because this question is so very difficult. It’s like picking a favorite landscape. They are all so rich and distinctive. When you add in the temporal dimension, it becomes impossible to analyze in any satisfyingly quantitative way. What about the gut? When I imagine myself standing before a machine, a portal that can move me to any place on Earth’s surface, anywhere in time, with the only catch being that I must live there until I die—where do I picture? What’s the first image that comes to mind? It’s not a place, I realize, but people. I think of my family. I want to mess with the rules a bit, I have decided. Under this new modified version, I get to take my family, and all the other people that are important to me, because people are more important than place. But here, the thought experiment breaks down. How could you make that decision for someone else? How could you even feel comfortable trying to *persuade* someone to sever themselves from their world, in order to follow you into a remote corner of space and time? You probably couldn’t, but this question is built on fantasy. In our thought experiment, all of my loved ones and friends are there, and they all love it, and love me for picking it, and so, getting back to the question, where is there?
I am tempted to do the old genie trick of asking for infinite wishes, by wishing for my place to be the wormhole portal room, or somewhere else that would let me slip into new worlds as often as I pleased. But that’s a question-defeating cheat, so I try to go back to first principles. What makes a great place? Can some mix of qualities—the natural landscape, the buildings, the culture, the history in the air and underfoot—be abstracted from all the places that capture my imagination? Middle Kingdom Egypt. Renaissance Florence. The Pre-Columbian Pacific Northwest. I’m not sure it can. All of us have had that experience where a place seems great on paper, but disappoints in person. How much more severe might your disappointment be, if you were to travel in time? What if you journeyed into antiquity, into Homer’s Greece, and it turned out that the “pure serene” imagined by Keats was actually quite stale, or worse, shockingly backward. After all, our experience of ancient culture is so filtered. Only the masterpieces of the masterpieces from the geniuses of geniuses have come down to us through these thousands of years. They may prove to be a cloudy, distorting window into the past.
All this is a way of saying that I have my doubts about what can be learned about a place, from mere images or even words. That makes any leap into the past quite scary, and it makes the future even more risky, for we have no images or words from it. All we have is a crude proxy, our personal answer to this question: Are things getting better or worse? Agnosticism is probably the safe bet, the intellectually responsible thing to do—but most of us have an intuition, a base level optimism or pessimism. Take me: I worry intensely about climate change, and natural and technological disasters of every sort, but still, I think I’m in the former camp.