Time and Again

Literature and History and...

Time and Again is Jack Finney's classic novel of understanding the past. "Its spellbinding story tells of a young man enlisted in a secret Government experiment who is transported from the mid-20th century to New York in 1882. There he falls in love with a beautiful woman and ultimately finds himself forced to choose between living in the present and living in the past. The book, first published to favorable critical reaction but modest sales in 1970, went on to achieve a vast cult following, as dogeared copies have been passed along repeatedly and enthusiastically from old readers to new." (The New York Times)

One of the key concepts of this novel is the ability to understand another time deeply, which comes, at the start, from "breaking ties with the present."

From Time and Again, which takes place about 1970:

"He said, "What day is this?"

"Thursday."

"What date?"

"The ... twenty-sixth, isn't it?"

"You tell me."

"The twenty-sixth."

"What month?"

"November."

"And year?"

I told him; I was smiling a little now.

"How do you know?"

Waiting for a reply to form itself in my mind, I sat staring across the table at Danziger's intent, bald-headed face; then I shrugged. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"Then I'll answer for you. You know the year, the day and the month, for literally millions of reasons: because the blanket you woke up under this morning may have been at least partly synthetic; because there is probably a box in your apartment with a switch; turn that switch, and the faces of living human

beings will appear on a glass screen in the face of that box and speak nonsense to you. Because red and

green lights signaled when you might cross a street on your way here this morning; and because the soles

of the shoes you walked in are a synthetic that will outlast leather.

"Because the fire engine that passed you sounded a hooter, not a siren; because the teen-aged children

you saw were dressed as they were; and because the Negro you walked by eyed you warily, as you did

him, each of you trying to conceal it. Because the front page of the Times looked precisely as it did this

morning and as it never will again or ever has before. And because millions and millions and millions of

still other such facts will confront you all day long.

"Most of them are possible only in this century, many only in the latter half of it. Some are possible onlythis decade, some only this year, others only this month, and a few only on this particular day. Si, you aresurrounded by literally countless facts that bind you to this century ... year ... month ... day ... andmoment, like ten billion invisible threads."He picked up his fork to cut into his pie, but instead he raised it to touch his forehead with the handle."And in here there are millions more of those invisible threads. Your knowledge, for example, of who isPresident at this moment of history. That Frank Sinatra could now be a grandfather. That buffalo nolonger roam the prairie, and that Kaiser Wilhelm isn't generally considered too much of a threat anymore. That our coins are now made of copper, not silver. That Ernest Hemingway is dead, everything isturning to plastic, and that things don't go one bit better with Coke. The list is endless, all of it a part ofyour own consciousness and of the common consciousness. And it binds you as it binds us all to the dayand to the very moment when precisely that list and only that list is possible. You never escape it, and I'llshow you why."

Danziger gestured at the invisible horizons with his fork and said, "There lies what? New York? And the

world beyond it? Yes, you can say that, of course; the New York and world of the moment. But you can

equally well say that there lies November twenty-sixth. Out there lies the day you walked through this morning; it is filled with the inescapable facts that make it today. It will be almost identical tomorrow, very

likely, but not quite. In some households things will have worn out, used today for the last time. An old

dish will have finallybroken, a hair or two come out gray at the roots, the first flick of a new illness begun.

Some people alive today will be dead. Some scattered buildings will be a little closer to completion. Or

destruction. And what will lie out there then, equally inescapably, will be a little different New York and

world and therefore a little different day." Danziger began walking forward toward an edge of the roof,

cutting off a bite of pie as he walked. "Pretty good pie. You should have had some. I made certain we

got a damn good cook."

It was nice up here: As we walked, the sun, deflected up from the rooftop, felt good on the face. We

stopped at the edge of the roof and leaned on the waist-high extension of the building wall, and again

Danziger gestured at the city. "The degree of change each day is usually too slight to perceive much

difference. Yet those tiny daily changes have brought us from a time when what you'd have seen down

there instead of traffic lights and hooting fire engines, was farmland, treetops, and streams; cows at

pasture, men in tricornered hats; and British sailing ships anchored in a clear-running, tree-shaded East

River. It was out there once, Si. Can you see it?"

I tried. I stared out at the uncountable thousands of windows in the sooty sides of hundreds of buildings,

and down at the streets nearly solid with car tops. I tried to turn it back into a rural scene, imagining a

man down there with buckles on his shoes and wearing a pigtailed white wig, walking along a dusty

country road called the broad way. It was impossible.

"Can't do it, can you? Of course not. You can see yesterday; most of it is still left. And there's plenty of

1965, '62, '58. There's even a good deal left of nineteen hundred. And in spite of all the indistinguishable

glass boxes and of monstrosities like the Pan Am Building and other crimes against nature and the

people"—he waggled a hand before his face as though erasing them from sight—"there are fragments of

still earlier days. Single buildings. Sometimes several together. And once you get away from midtown,

there are entire city blocks that have been where they still stand for fifty, seventy, even eighty and ninety

years. There are scattered places a century or more old, and a very few which actually knew the presence of Washington." Rube was up here now, I saw, wearing a felt hat and a light topcoat, deferentially waiting a few token paces out of earshot. "Those places are fragments still remaining, Si"—Danziger's fork swept the horizon once more—"of days which once lay out there as real as the day lying out there now: still-surviving fragments of a clear April morning of 1871, a gray winter afternoon of 1840, a rainy dawn of 1793."

I would say this project began, Si, on the clay it occurred to me that just possibly there is a way to dissolve those threads (binding you to the present)."