July Diary Collaboration question, suggested by me, and now answered by me: What if you discovered you could use a time machine and could go back in time just once, for just an hour? What would you do? Save the world? Meet with a famous person? Wreak havoc by messing with events?
This question is the flip side of another game I like to play where you bring a person from another age forward in time and try to explain something, like planes, or penicillin, or cloning. It's fun, and harder than it seems, and I often ask it as a sort of party question.
As for me, I'm in the "meet a famous person" camp. I've no interest in changing the world although I'd be glad to nip back in time and offer Hitler's parents some condoms. But the real catch with this time machine business is you'd have to convince someone you were from the future, get them to open up to you, and then dash back in only one hour's time. Seems very unlikely you'd get any sensible conversation out of anyone. Well, maybe Oscar Wilde.
Before choosing we must first acknowledge that the ideal historical person would have to speak English very well, and fairly modern English at that. I think I could muddle through back as far as the 18th century but before that the language was too different for my ears. I can barely manage Shakespeare, and must always be looking up the translations in the back of the book. Thus, I regretfully give up Athenais, Madame de Montespan, along with Madame Vigee-LeBrun, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Bess of Hardwick.
If it must be modern and English, I think first of all I'd like to speak with Jane Austen in her late teens. If someone else had already bagged her, I'd have a chat with Victoria Woodhull, a most interesting and complex woman. E. Nesbitt would be good, too, a revolutionary feminist with a penchant for making trouble and writing really good children's books. No men, you notice; I would want to meet women who had unusual talents and the courage to pursue their visions, whether in art or reform or education. I don't much care about going back in time to meet men as men have consistently imposed their viewpoint at the expense of women. I can go read about men any old time; I'd like to meet the sparkling intellects of historical women who were acknowledged, admired, even honored in their day and then brushed aside as footnotes by later generations of male academicians.
The thing about meeting Jane Austen is so many of us want to. I think there could be a good short story wherein poor Jane is beseiged throughout her life by time machine wielders constantly popping in to talk to her. Even if they were limited to only one hour it would be annoying. Eventually, I suppose, she would have to devise a note to hand to each new visitor: yes, yes, you're from the future and you want to ask me about Elizabeth Bennet but I'm working and I don't want to know about planes or penicillin or cloning. And she'd carry on making parsnip wine or gooseberry jelly and all we poor visitors could do is look on while breathing in the authentic 18th century atmosphere.
Time machines would be a nuisance.
