Mark Twain, in “A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s court” (1889)
“When I was a young boy,
My momma said to me:
There’s only one girl in the world for you,
But she probably lives in Tahiti.”
Wreckless Eric, from the song, “Whole wide world”
The past is like a foreign country. And if you can visit a foreign country, why
can’t you visit the past?
Everyone must surely have had this fantasy:
You’ve stumbled across a time machine.
You grab some commonplace technology like binoculars and
an instant camera. Then you stroll
through the door into the past, amazing the locals with your wondrous goods.
Precisely where the fantasy goes from there
depends on your personality and preferences.
Perhaps you set up shop in the 1920s, getting rich from your camera patents
and hanging out with Louis Armstrong.
Perhaps you go further back, and use your technology to become a great
king. I like to imagine travelling to
Tahiti before the first Europeans arrived.
It might seem like quite a childish
fantasy, and I suppose it is. But some
great minds have indulged the thought as well – so it must be all
right. A good example is Mark Twain’s,
“A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court”.
He imagines an American engineer from the 19th Century finding
his way to the court of the ancient British King Arthur. The hero then sets up a printing press and
telegraph station and enjoys being treated as a magician greater than Merlin.
The trouble is that recently I have been
losing the ability to hold together a fantasy.
To put it another way, I struggle to suspend my disbelief. Anyone who watches movies or reads fiction
learns to suspend their disbelief. You
know that the characters aren’t real, but you try to forget that fact until the
story finishes.
I’ve become annoyingly logical. I’m just stepping out of my speedboat onto
the 17th Century Tahitian beach.
I should be reassuring the grass-skirted locals and taking out my gifts
(of Scotch whiskey). So why am I
suddenly getting worried about approaching too closely? In my mind I’m getting concerned about
diseases. I’m thinking that a man from
the present day has no resistance to diseases which ceased to be common
long before he was born.
[Pop!]
My fantasy has burst and I’m back in 2016. The baby is crying and my wife is shouting
something about dishes in the sink. And
she isn’t wearing a grass skirt, either.
Vocabulary:
to strike bottom – to reach the lowest
point
to stumble across – to find by chance
commonplace – ordinary; unexceptional
binoculars – two lenses connected together,
which you place in front of your eyes to make distant objects appear closer
a patent – of an invention, legal
recognition of ownership (ie. If you copy the design, you must pay the holder
of the patent)
to indulge – to allow oneself to enjoy the
pleasure of
logical – rational; using clear thinking
resistance – the ability to fight against
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