A time machine, that wouldn’t be so crazy now. It seems like half the world would love to go back to a different time and to be honest, I can agree with that. In the new novel by Rob van Essen, I will come back to that his main character ends up with an old fellow student who has a kind of teletransporter with which you can be transferred – the main character, like the reader, struggles in disbelief, but what is the point of that.
When I sometimes fantasize about a time machine, which doesn’t happen very often, I usually imagine that I could take a look at Constantinople around 1903, or in Couperus’s The Hague. Or, while we’re at it: in Athens around 450 BC. Seeing what it really looked like, what it smelled like, what it felt like – it would be a huge extension of your experience.
Not so with Rob van Essen. With him, characters are given the opportunity to return to a point in their own lives, to make amends, but that doesn’t change anything about the future. Purely therapeutic.
And there goes the main character, back to Amsterdam one day in 1993.
But that’s wonderful! He is back in a familiar environment, all kinds of things that he had more or less forgotten are now there again and they feel completely normal and as they should be. The yellow trams, the bicycles without electric propulsion, no one looking at a phone, half-empty cafes where you drink latte.
Immediately I was really looking forward to spending a day strolling around Amsterdam in the early 1990s. The Rokin would still be an untidy parking lot and the building housing the NRC editorial staff was not there yet. There were no tourists on the canals and the nine streets, which were not yet called that, had really nice little shops instead of chains and nonsense. Officers were still wearing pants and a puffy jacket with lots of pockets, not one of those combat suits with stripes.
And above all, the future still looked so pleasant in 1993. The world was getting better all the time or could become better, the first disciplinary-of-the-market thinkers did start to explain their ideals, but that still seemed like innocent nonsense, the wall was gone, democracy was advancing, there was virtually no internet left. Not me in any case. Of course there was the war in Yugoslavia. Even in the 1990s, paradise was not found on earth.
But actually I’m already going too far. At Van Essen exactly what you imagine happens: your ‘self’ of today looks around at the world of then. Of course, you don’t go back to your former self, so you don’t have any past feelings about the future.
I’m sure the pleasure of remembering a place in that past tense has nothing to do with the state of the world but something much harder to grasp. With why everyone goes ‘oh yes!’ calls when you see the fabric of the sofa in grandma and grandpa’s living room, or a photo of a vanished place where you often sat. Finding small parts of the once familiar.
That delight would probably be short-lived if you could really take a look at the world at that time, to feel how natural it was. You would feel that, with your current consciousness, your entire history since then, you no longer belong in it, you can no longer be at home in it. Even if you wanted to.