Time and Again. Jack Finney.

Time and Again
Jack Finney
New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction
1970 (1995)

Why read it? A fascinating novel. As part of a government project, Simon Morley is recruited to try to return to the New York City of 1882. His ability to do so is based on Einstein’s theory that the past is still within reach. Morley is, of course, able to make the transition. Here’s where the novel becomes serious. The issue is whether, if we have the ability to rejoin the past, whether we should make changes that will affect the present age and the future.

A good portion of the novel concerns a mystery letter that had been sent to a wealthy man named Carmody from a Jake Pickering. Portions of the letter have been burned and what is left suggests a secret that could burn the world. Great chase scenes in the New York City of 1882, a vicious detective and a surprise ending. Having found a girl in 1882, Simon Morley decides to return to 1882 and stay there because the environment is still essentially unpolluted. In doing so, he manages to make certain that the head of the project in 1970 is never born.

Sample Ideas from the Novel.
Topic Page Idea
1882 126 “Nearly every vehicle had four wheels and every wheel was wrapped in iron that smashed and rang against the cobbles, every horse had four iron-shod hoofs that did the same…. Wheels clattered, wood groaned, chains rattled, leather creaked, whips cracked….and no street I’ve ever seen in the twentieth century made even half that brain-numbing sound.”
1882 133 “There were lights, thousands of them, but no brightness…. Thousands of tiny flecks affecting the darkness not at all; they were gaslights….”
1882 149 “It [the snow] was speckled black with soot; this was still a dirty city, especially in winter…with tens of thousands of coal and wood fires pouring carbon into the air.”
1882 149 “Before every house stood hitching posts of black-painted cast iron; the tops of some were horses’ heads with rings through the noses. Before each post stood a broad stone block for stepping up into carriages….”
1882 180 “…only the well-off carried watches [in 1882]…. They were expensive, to be passed on to sons and grandsons after them; no Timexes here.”
1882 218 “But there was also an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone…. Their faces were animated, they were glad to be just where they were, alive in that moment and place…. And above all, they carried with them a sense of purpose…. They weren’t bored…. I’m convinced that those men moved through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being and that’s something worth having, and losing it is to lose something vital.”
1882 235 “It was a great sight, and walking along the path I felt that every sense was stirred and I was suddenly keenly aware of the winter actuality of it.”
1882 235 “…and I swear that the eyes of every man and woman and child who jingled past me were smiling with the pleasure of the moment.”
1882 177 “It took me a few stores to realize we hadn’t seen any dresses in the windows, and when I said so to Julia she looked puzzled. ‘But dresses are made at home,’ she said.”

America 378 Si on whether he should let Julia stay in the twentieth century: “No, I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison in our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended Polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate ach other. And we’re used to it.”

Causality 230 “And it doesn’t matter anyway; really important events aren’t casually brought about. They’re the result of so many intertwined important forces that they’re inevitable, no one thing causing them.”

Curiosity 73 “It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger even than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know.”

Einstein 51 “…Einstein announced that E equals MC squared. And God forgive us, two Japanese cities disappeared in the blink of an eye and proved he was right again.”
Einstein 52 “[Einstein] said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We cannot see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there…. a man ought somehow to be able to step out of the boat onto the shore. And walk back to one of the bends behind us.”

Past 73 “ ‘Because surely you’ve understood’—he leaned across the desk toward me--- ‘that there cannot be the least intervention of any kind in events of the past. To alter the past would be to alter the future which derived from it. The consequences of that are unimaginable, and, it is an utterly unacceptable risk.’ ”

Purpose 64 “Why did the Wrights want to build an airplane? To create jobs for stewardesses? Or give us a way to bomb Vietnam? No, I think all they really had in mind was to see if they could.”
Purpose 64 “Impressive purposes were invented later to justify the horrible expense of these toys, but the first tries were just for the hell of it, boy, and that’s our reason, too.”

Science 228 “How? Because you don’t turn back. Not ever. You don’t spend billions preparing to send a man to the moon, and then decide not to. Or invent the airplane, look it over, and decide to uninvent it because someday someone might use it to drop a bomb. You just don’t stop something as enormous as this, the human race never has. Risk? Yes, maybe. Yes, certainly. But who did that ever stop?”
Science 230 “Listen to him [Dr. Danziger] long enough, and you’ll think that if you sneezed too loud back in January 1882, you might somehow set off a chain of events that could blow up the world.”
Science 389 “Even if you’re right about Cuba, as you may be, look what it leads to. It leads directly to bigger and bigger changes, with a handful of military minds re-writing the past, present and future according to their ideas of what’s best for the rest of the human race.”
Science 223 “…because it is not true, it is simply not true, that we ought to continue doing something just because we’ve discovered we can. It is becoming more and more certain, as science uses an almost brand-new ability to pull apart the deepest puzzles of the universe, that we need not and should not necessarily do something only because we’ve learned how.”

Time and Again 142 “Is it true or not that we can [through going back in time] actually increase historical knowledge in a way never before open to us?”
Time and Again 107 “Because now I know—I knew—that January of 1882 existed out there, too. And I knew—knew—that when the time came I was going to be able to walk out into it once again.”
Time and Again 72 The letter to Andrew W. Carmody, Esq. mailed in New York City, in the Main Post Office, Jan. 23, 1882: “If a discussion of Court House carrera should prove of interest to you, please appear in City Hall Park at half past twelve on Thursday next…. That the sending of this should cause the destruction by fire of the entire World…[next word burned] seemed well nigh incredible. Yet it is so, and the fault and guilt…mine, and can never be denied or escaped. So, with this wretched souvenir of that event before me, I now end the life which should have ended then.”
Time and Again 104 “I’m turning away now, to step back inside [from the balcony of his apartment at the Dakota]. I see that several windows are lighted—the cleaning women, I suppose—in the Museum of Natural History…. Between my eyes and the Museum stood four solid blocks of apartment houses rising far above the roof of the Dakota. The Museum hadn’t been visible—not from the balcony—since the early eighteen-eighties.”
Time and Again 234 “The end result of this pilot project, it was hoped, would be a workable method for enlarging our entire knowledge of history.”
Time and Again 256 “I was finally going to know what the note n the blue envelope meant. ‘…the destruction by fire of the entire World….’ The words were senseless, they didn’t mean anything, only they did: On a day far in the future Andrew Carmody would put a bullet through his head because of them.”
Time and Again 393 “Was it possible for me to go back and live out my life with Julia? Could I do that knowing the future? Could I live in nineteenth-century New York and look at infants in their carriages, knowing what lay ahead for them? It was a vanished world; actually nearly every soul in it long since dead: could I ever really join it?”
Time and Again 397 Si visits the theater where he is to see Dr. Danziger’s father who is about to meet the woman who is destined to be his mother. But he blocks Danziger’s future father’s view by asking for a light and they do not meet. They pass on, never destined to meet and Dr. Danziger would never be.
Time and Again 398 “And the man—the facial resemblance had been very strong—who would have become Dr. Danziger’s father and the girl in green who in time would have become his mother, now never would be.”