All Reading is Time Travel

Books connect us to what really happened, what's possible too

How often do you feel transported in time when reading a good book? Perhaps that’s the definition of whether a book is good, whether it can do that for a reader. I was reading Matt Haig’s newest book, The Life Impossible, a few weeks ago when words on the page popped with synchronicity:

"For instance, whenever I read an autobiography — Maya Angelou or Anne Frank or Richard Feynman or whomever — I feel a kind of empathy, where a tiny part of me becomes for a short while the person I am reading about.

I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. […]

All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.”

Seeing Anne Frank named on that page caught me by surprise, because I was also reading Alice Hoffman’s new book, When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary. I had seen this interview in the Minnesota Star Tribune where Alice Hoffman describes her own sort of time travel to research the book, connecting to her own 12-year old self as well as imagining what Anne Frank was like in the few years before she went into hiding in Amsterdam.

When We Flew Away revealed what it looks like when hate-fed fascism begins to rear its ugly head. What really happened from 1940 to 1942 in the lead-up to World War II. How neighbors turned against neighbors. How it could happen again.

I am working with an author-in-progress named Leni de Mik, a retired clinical psychologist who was a young girl in Holland during the Nazi occupation. Her father was part of the Resistance, her aunt sheltered a Jewish child, she emigrated to Canada as an eight-year-old. Her book arose because the COVID bubbles of isolation brought up so many early feelings about how we treat each other. Her forthcoming book will ask our hearts to consider, “For whom shall we risk?”

Earlier this month, Leni received an award from her neighborhood council, the Linden Hills Treasure award. When accepting the award, Leni shared her thoughts (read the full article here) about the importance of connection:

My early years unfolded in Holland. Like so many people on our planet today, my childhood was in a war zone. I was born in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Holland. I was four when I watched “the enemy” leave. But while the war was over, restoration had only begun. Restoration takes time as is true everywhere after a long war or national disaster. The village was bombed into ruins; hunger continued until food sources were re-established. And a new terror, the shadow of Stalin, loomed large and deepened. Having lived through two world wars, my father knew it could happen again.

It did happen again and still could. I say that because while traveling last week, I happened to find this time-travel of a story in my family’s shared ebook library: Isabelle Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea, a novel based on the true lives of a family who survived the Spanish Civil War and took a ship with poet Pablo Neruda to Chile, where hate-fueled facism again caused an upheaval of repression and violence.

I was struck by the synchronicity of stumbling across yet another book that paints the picture of what really DID happen, even though the events are fictionalized. I feel the weight of reality today, where we see people laughing and cheering for hatred, violence, division, racism, facism, Nazi-ism — none of which is a joke.

I am in awe of authors who can craft their words into stories that touch our hearts and minds, who paint pictures of the past so we can consider what kind of future we really want to co-create. The next book I just reserved from the library is HUM, by Helen Phillips, about a family in a dystopian future, (book rec thanks to Courtney Martin’s substack, who wrote, “Sometimes the best way to engage with the darker forces in our world is by wrestling with them in literature or art.”

Literature can take us to the dark side and then into the light. Back to the narrator’s voice in Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible, pronouncing that islands don’t exist, that we need to look after each other:

“We aren’t just a person, we aren’t just a gender, we aren’t just an age, we aren’t just a nationality, we aren’t even just a species. The walls between us are imaginary. […]

“We think we are lonely because we are often blind to the connections. But to be alive is to be a life, to be life. We are life. The same ever-evolving life. We need each other.”

Thank goodness for author voice like these. Whether writing memoir or fiction, even non-fiction, we authors are called to time-travel to harvest our lessons and wisdom, to recreate scenes from the past that inform our present and future. We even time-travel to the future to think of the readers who we hope to educate, inspire and inform with our words. I call on the words of Albert Einstein:

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” ~ Albert Einstein

I want to believe we are deciding on a world where compassion and empathy guide the policies more than greed and power. I want to decide that the universe is friendly, abundant, welcoming.

I want to believe that what feels impossible IS possible, like Emil Antonucci said, (the designer of the Four Seasons logo and principle of Journeyman Press):

“What I want is the impossible. I want as much diversity in things, in people, in places, in ideas as possible. But I want unity among things and people and places and ideas. I want that unity without anything losing its uniqueness.” ~ Emil Antonucci

Let’s make this possible! Vote if you haven’t already (and you’re in the U.S.) Let’s ensure the horrors of the past aren’t repeated, and the possibilities of a brighter future can come to pass.

Two Voices Inspiring Me Lately:

• The Quiet Voice of Courage: Vocabulary of the Soul by Veronika Bond

• Doing What I Want: An essay on creative freedom by Jamal Robinson

Time-Travel to Halloween 1976

For fun and giggles, I found this photo in our basement box of picture frames this week of me and my sister, Jenene, dressed up and ready for trick-or-treating: