Welcome back to the Gone Astray Books Blog!
So! As my son, Audie, and I were watching Star Trek: Next Gen on loop the other day, Audie posed a very unexpected question. He asked: “If you could have one superpower, what superpower would you choose?”
Now, I was in quite the kerfuffle. I needed time to carefully consider the different possibilities that the superpowers held. (Sidenote: thankfully Audie didn’t ask me to pick a superhero – because I don’t really know any of them deeply enough to make such a choice. But that is for a different blog). Unfortunately, the time allowed for thinking was limited by the impatient seven-year-old in charge. “Invisibility.” I said.
I asked him the same question, “if you could have one superpower, what superpower would YOU choose?”
“I don’t know,” he shot back
I. DON’T. KNOW. Really kid?! That’s what I get. I don’t know.
“What do you not know?” I countered.
“I think I would do teleportation,” he said finally. “That way I can go anywhere I want and come right back when I’m done.”
You are probably wondering by now what in the world any of this has to do with a blog on a bookstore’s website. You are right for wondering this – even I am wondering it a little. There is a point though.
I kept thinking about it. Teleportation. Now, my knowledge of teleportation is pretty much summed up by the workings of the “transport room” manned by Mr. O’ Brien on the Starship Enterprise, which is not a very expansive field of knowledge.
So, what I began wondering was about the correlation between teleportation and time travel and whether these concepts two could operate simultaneously - allowing the traveler to, not only be able to control WHERE there they are, but also WHEN they are. This got me thinking about the book Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. The more that I thought about time travel, the more I was pulled to this book (and… ta-dah… there’s the connection.)
The main idea of the book is time travel. You visit a bookshop where you can travel to the past. However, to complicate matters, you can go to the past, but you cannot change the present. And that is the conflict. If you can travel to the past, but you are not able to change anything about your present, would you go to the past anyway? What is your main motivator for staying or going? And (the one that ties a knot in my brain) is it not possible that your travel to the past is already part of your present? All of this is of course disputable. These are just the things that go through my mind.
I have no idea whether I would stay or go, especially if I couldn’t change anything. Isn’t that the primary reason that people want to time travel? To change the present? Or is it a whole mentality of regret. I guess that is what is boils down to, this sense of regret – if I had done something different, spoken to someone, or rather, not spoken to them, or any one of in the plethora of what ifs in between – would the world look different? Would I be happier or the same? Is this something ingrained in us over time? A sort of mental evolution? Or is it like fight or flight?
It is easy to go through the what ifs with the “I might be happier if I had done something different” often overlooking the other side of this argument, that being “what would I lose if I had done things differently?” I think it is important to take that in consideration.
I think I have made my decision. If I could go to the past and not change anything about the present, I would go for it. ‘Cause why not? That way I can go back to a place to visit someone I love and not worry about changing everything.