A Dilemma of Time Travel
I have given this thought. I think most people don’t realize that if you go back in time, you won’t understand what you are looking at.
In a world of weirdness, you appear in the midst of a place that’s inconceivable. It is not like anywhere you know. You come to think that the people you encounter along the way are dressed as from another time. They don’t speak a language you have ever heard before. They make gestures with their faces and hands, and you can’t register what they mean. They take you in with some reluctance, it seems, and you wonder where you have arrived. You have gone back in time to some other place — or not. This is what you have to piece together. If you witness an actual event that you know about because you have heard about it, how would you ever recognize it? How would you understand that you have just time travelled?
Routine is what makes up our reality, and if you break that, it becomes an event. The event is placed into a nice story later when all the parts you have access to have been given to you, and you have thought about these parts and their relation with each other. That means the story is over. Now, you make the story your own.
A time travel experience can never be like that. You are never sure that what you are witnessing is the event. Or the shadow of an event. Or the mockery of that event. Or a dramatic interpretation of that event, given by a troupe of criminal actors with schemes of robbing the crowd.
You see three men on crosses on some hill and conclude you are witnessing the death of Jesus. You don’t have enough information to come up with such a conclusion. First of all, you don’t know what Jesus looks like. Then, you can’t speak the ancient languages of those days. And in the rare case that you can, a reasonable person would still be in doubt.