Why I Need a Time Machine

Physicists and other such people whose profession it is to think deeper than the rest of us, have concluded that time travel is impossible. My hope, however, is that at a school called MIT, in Cambridge Massachusetts, a few people are still trying to get such a thing to work. MIT is just a few miles down the road from where I live, and when someone there gets time travel to work, I’ll be first in line to give it a try. I have literary projects that can be carried out only with the aid of time travel.

First, I want to be present at a performance of Hamlet in which Shakespeare plays the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Or find out that he never played that role. After the performance, I’d like to work my way backstage and tell Shakespeare that a lot of people where (when?) I come from think that Francis Bacon wrote your plays. What do you have to say to that? And of course I want to hear how he pronounced English. Would I be able to understand him? And how did he say his lines? Did Olivier and Gielgud get it right? And what about his audience? Did they actually understand what was being said and done up there on the stage? Too many questions, maybe.

Next, I would like to be in Lord Chesterfield’s parlor when he picks up and reads the letter that Samuel Johnson wrote to him, declining Chesterfield’s offer to help Johnson, now when he had finally, after years of poverty and toil, published his dictionary of the English language. Chesterfield had rebuffed Johnson when he asked for help at the start of his work on the dictionary. Johnson’s letter is the greatest eff-you epistle in the English language, and perhaps in any language. Johnson wrote, in part:

Seven years, my lord, have now past since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. . . . Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.”

Lord Chesterfield is thought to have been impressed by the letter and to have said something like “My word, Johnson really is an able man!” Yeah, right.

After that, I would like to be present at one of the lectures by Henry David Thoreau that made the members of his audience laugh until they had tears in their eyes. That’s right. Thoreau had ‘em rolling in the aisles. This is according to his recent biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

Thoreau liked to try out his writing on audiences, and much of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden, and the posthumous Cape Cod was first delivered as lectures before his neighbors and townspeople. They relished his sarcasm, hyperbole, and deadpan wit. This raises an important question of interpretation. We don’t think of Thoreau as a funny man. To the extent that we don’t, we fail to understand him.

Finally, I would like to be standing next to Lincoln when he deliveres his Second Inaugural Address. He is said to have had a tenor voice, which carries far. Still, he could have expected to reach only the closest part of his huge audience. Did he raise his voice? And how did he deliver that sublime speech? It would have challenged a professional actor. Walter Bagehot, who edited the London Economist during Lincoln’s presidency, wrote after Lincoln’s death that the speech had extorted an “involuntary outburst of admiration” from the editor of The Times, a long standing critic of Lincoln.

What did his voice sound like? We would know very likely, if Edison had invented the phonograph fifteen years earlier. Lincoln was fascinated by technological advances and would have invited Edison to the White House for a recording session.

Anyway, Lincoln spent much of his youth in southern Indiana and would have formed his speech patterns and accent there. This makes it likely that he sounded like another tenor from southern Indiana, the Hall of Fame power forward of the Boston Celtics, Larry Bird.

And that is why I need a time machine.