All our yesterdays

There was an episode of the classic Trek series (“All Our Yesterdays”) in which humanoids on a planet threatened by a supernova use their technology to escape into the past. This episode glosses over the paradoxes of time travel. But that aside, it raises some provocative issues.

If you had no future, if the present were soon to be uninhabitable, such that your only option was to stake out some corner of the past, where and when would you choose to live?

For those who were blessed by a happy childhood or adolescence, many would probably return to the halcyon days their youth. Not to be young again, exactly, but to go back to that decade.

Of course, some folks could hardly wait to get childhood behind them. Leave home and never look back.

On a related note, some folks have an adventurous streak Wanderlust. They may even feel that they were born in the wrong century. So both groups would choose some period long before they were born.

That, of course, raises the question of whether the past is better or worse than the present. Or better in some ways, but worse in others. There may be tradeoffs.

To some extent, your choice also depends on your religious persuasion. A pious Protestant would have no inclination to be born before the Protestant Reformation.

In theory, a Catholic would be happy living in any period of church history, but especially before the Photian schism or the Protestant Reformation. After all, wasn’t that the golden age before all those incorrigible schismatics rent the Body of Christ?

But one wonders how many pious Catholics would really trade, say, 20C Edinburgh for 14C Edinburgh. Methinks they would choose lifestyle over piety.

Yet this raises another question as well. For the Bible-believing Christian has a futuristic orientation. However, the future he longs for is not a future in a fallen world. But rather, another world on the far side of the fall. The new Eden. The new Jerusalem.

There is a sense, especially for aging believers, that they might as well be living on a long abandoned planet. A planet from which all other inhabitants made their escape. Like one of those dystopian futures with rusty towns and barren cities. Deserted streets. Empty homes. Unbroken silence–except for wind whistling through the vacant boulevards.

From the Christian standpoint, so many inhabitants have gone ahead. So much now lies on the other side of the cemetery. So little remains here and now.

When, in old age, a man or woman outlives his friends from childhood, outlives his parents and grandparents, outlives the members of his own generation, there’s nothing quite to take their place. Yes, he can make new friends. But the bond of shared experience is absent.

The sense of growing up together. Growing old together. Passing through the same lifecycle at the same time and place. Discovering the phases of life in tandem, with a fellow passenger or traveler, along the journey of life. All that is gone. Irrevocable and irreversible.

It’s not simply that we feel old. But the world feels old. Used up. Worn out. A spent force. A tired, exhausted world. As if the world itself had passed through the lifecycle. A planet in its final dying days, just before the supernova.

We yearn to be young again, yet not in the sense of going back to the end of the line and reliving the last 50 years. But in the ardent yearning for the world to be young again.

This world is haunted by too much history. Too much tragedy. Too much iniquity. A land polluted by generations of innocent blood. Heaving under the weight of too many memories.