Time To Embark On Time Travel

Michael Crichton, 'Timeline',  1999:

“....Kate said, “André, come on.”

There was a short silence. Then: “I’m not leaving,” Marek said. “I’m staying here.”

“André. You’re not thinking right.”

“Yes, I am.”

She said, “Are you serious?”

Kate looked at the Professor. He just nodded slowly.

“All his life, he’s wanted this.”

Chris put the ceramic marker in the slot at his feet.

:

Marek watched from the window of the gatehouse.

“Hey, André.” It was Chris.

“See you, Chris.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“André.” It was Kate. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Good-bye, Kate.”

Then he heard the Professor say: “Good-bye, André.”

“Good-bye,” Marek said.

Through his earpiece, he heard a recorded voice say, “Stand still — eyes open — deep breath — hold it. . . . Now!”

On the plain, he saw a brilliant flash of blue light. Then there was another, and another, diminishing in intensity, until there was nothing more.

Doniger strode back and forth across the darkened stage. In the auditorium, the three corporate executives sat silently, watching him.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “the artifice of entertainment — constant, ceaseless entertainment — will drive people to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape. And what is the most authentic of all? The past.

“The past is a world that already existed before Disney and Murdoch and British Telecom and Nissan and Sony and IBM and all the other shapers of the present. The past was here before they were. The past rose and fell without their intrusion and molding. The past is real. It’s authentic. And this will make the past unbelievably attractive. Because the past is the only alternative to the corporate present.

“What will people do? They are already doing it. The fastest-growing segment of travel today is cultural tourism. People who want to visit not other places, but other times. People who want to immerse themselves in medieval walled cities, in vast Buddhist temples, Mayan pyramid cities, Egyptian necropolises. People who want to walk and be in the world of the past. The vanished world.

“And they don’t want it to be fake. They don’t want it to be made pretty, or cleaned up. They want it to be authentic...."

“When Brooklyn became unaffordable, we moved to the Middle Ages.”  

Artist: Michael Maslin, The New Yorker, March 2017