In this RadioLab segment, artist David McDermott talks about his attempt to live an Edwardian existence in 21st-century Dublin. His decision when young to step back, soak up the memories of much older people — ‘I felt like they knew something I didn’t know’ — and let the bleeding edge vanish over the horizon is likely to prick the curiosity of anyone neck-deep in technological gore:
In terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I’m not talking to you about actual time-travel. I’m trying to talk in practical terms that anyone can participate in, I call it, ‘time experimentation’.
All moments in time are ever-present and coexisting, he asserts: all that’s needed is a conscious choice to step into one. Escapist and contrived it may be, but in some respects our choice of place and space and engagements (and even dress) is a temporal choice, albeit one in finer gradations, like the adjustments of a clock before the railways.
All of which is backstory to this AskMefi question.
I’ve spent a decent chunk of my life in the environs of the mid-eighteenth century: hanging round the doorway, peeking in the windows. At its close, the world starts changing in radical ways: the years of fire and steam were arriving. (After initial scepticism, Samuel Johnson subscribed to a Montgolfier balloon flight in 1784, but his final illness kept him from leaving the ground.)
But the past is hard to shake off: so much that was familiar about life in 1780s London is gone from the city, but much still persists in the far corners of the world. Hence my question: is there anything that hasn’t survived, or is sufficiently rare to be considered obsolescent?
Not much, it seems. The most obvious contenders (slavery, whaling) persist in spite of prohibition. Others are rendered moot by juxtaposition: the world is a known place; travel brings contact with the present day’s compression of time and space, and its assumptions about roles, rights and responsibilities. The loss of the autonomy of distance is, I think, something we all perceive ever more intensely. (I’m looking at you, Twitter.)
This isn’t to say that there’s somewhere that’s the London of 1784 forever, or even for just this moment. Just that the past persists, and its echoes can be traced to places where they are no longer echoes, but new and renewed sound.
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Speaking of stretched time, another RadioLab begins and ends with the remarkable 9 Beet Stretch, which I suggested to the similarly remarkable Mr Webb as the ideal accompaniment to his Amtrak coast-to-coast trip back in 2004. (Rupert Goodwin’s mapping of 9BS to the time-travel of art and the time-acceleration of technology, written in the distant past of 2002, is also worth a look.)