Hello time traveller 🕰

Lately, the universe has been reminding me of how old I am. Here, just look at this drivel – I know a few folks subscribed to this newsletter who can relate:

1. Stuff I used to wear in my youth is fashionable again (hello, scrunchies and bootcut jeans)

2. Songs I listened to in my youth now have synthwave and disco house remixes, or are being sampled to death by new artists (to be fair, I quite like this)

3. There’s a burgeoning subculture based around tech that was hot and new when I first got online (neocities, I’m looking at you)

4. Bits and bobs I grew up with are all over Good Sammy stores like it’s nbd 🦭

5. Modern fiction set around the time I was born is now labelled “retro” (this one hurts!)

I had to research time travel for a story recently, which involved studying run-of-the-mill facts like quantum physics as well as having deep philosophical ponderings about the nature of time and our relationship to it. Science tells us we can’t go back in time, but that doesn’t seem to stop us trying.

When asked what you had for breakfast this morning, you’ll attempt to go back in time to bring that information to the present. Smell a familiar fragrance, and you’ll find yourself faced with past loves and fears. As you watch your parents age and slow down and wonder about the roads not taken, and you traverse a wormhole to the past, only to discover you left a part of yourself there.

The part of me that loves a little science-fantasy (the part that loves a bit of feng shui and The Core) likes to wonder if our minds might be the ultimate time travel machine. Maybe the hardware’s not quite there yet, what with memory being subjective and fallible, but version 2.0 might eventually get it sussed.

In his short story Exhalation, SF writer Ted Chiang plays with the idea that who we are in any given moment is determined by the differences in air pressure across the universe. It breathes life to a beautiful imagining: that somehow if you could re-create that difference in air pressure (even if just locally), perhaps you’d get another chance at something you wish could have gone differently. Would that leave you any better off, though? Only time would tell.

I’ll end this musing with my favourite question about going back in time. Please know that I’d love to hear back from you. I find you can ask this same question to someone at different points in their life, and quite often you’ll get a different answer!

Q: If who you are today could go back and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Hit reply. Let’s chat 😊 (You’ll also find my answer at the end of this email.)

Sandy.
sanlive.com

A little catchup: So, I blinked and seven months went by – talk about time travel! Since last time, I managed to finish a novelette and a novel, and devise a rudimentary con-lang for an otherworldly society. Interesting research I’ve stumbled upon have included time travel, the Eastern theatre of World War II, mini-golf, and fantasy-based adult toys. All topics have been mind-blowing in their own strange ways.

I’ve also been taking a wheel pottery class, after seeing the amazing stuff my friend Alex is making at Hampshire Ceramics. Some things are easier than they look, other things are fiddlier, but all of it is as fun and messy as you’d expect.

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There is no clock on Earth that gives the correct time

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have reported that their experience of time has become warped and weird … The clock continues to log its rigid seconds, minutes and hours, utterly unaware of the global crisis that is taking place. It is stable, correct, neutral and absolute.

But what makes us wrong and the clock right? “For most people, the last class they had devoted to clocks and time was early in primary school,” Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York who has been studying clocks for more than 30 years, told me recently. “There’s this thing that is central to our entire society, that’s built into all of our electronics. And we’re wandering around with an early primary school level of knowledge about it.”

“The medium is the message,” as they say, and the common modern clock seems to be a strange medium for the phenomenon of time. Please enjoy this insightful article (there’s also an option to listen to it). It gets a bit mind-bendy if you’ve only ever thought about time with respect to clocks.

Read: The Tyranny of Time by Joe Zadeh in Noēma Magazine

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Finally, here's what I'm up to now.

Finally finally, I don’t have many regrets from my youth, but one failing sticks with me so hard that thinking about it gives me a cold, icky, skin-crawly feeling. To that end, I’d advise my younger self to please roll up her freaking bootcut jeans before walking through puddles. I have a vivid sensory memory, and wet ankles are so unpleasant. Yuck.