Past Imperfect, Future Tense

Ever wish you could hit the rewind button on life—or fast-forward just to peek? Time, annoyingly, runs on a strict schedule, with the past sealed off and the future locked away until its appointed moment. I find that a cruel reality. It’s like eating the same dish every day while knowing there’s an exotic menu just beyond reach. Wouldn’t it be nice if the gods consulted us before making the rules?

With no time machine at the ready, we can still use our imaginations, consult AI, or just delve into unfettered fiction. I recently devoured three novels that scramble time in wonderfully different ways to get a peek into the kitchen. 

In Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, 35-year-old Nora Seed isn’t in a great place. She’s sad, isolated, and convinced she’s made a complete hash of her life. Then she finds herself in a magical library: a space between life and death. Every book she selects transports her to a version of the life she could have lived if she’d made different choices—Olympic swimmer, rock star, Parisian expat, yoga instructor, you name it. But there’s always a fly in the ointment: fame brings intrusion, adventure brings risk, and the yoga life still has the occasional sore knee. 

 She ends up returning to her original life, ready to live in the present. Admirable, sure, but I’d still want to browse a few more shelves, wouldn’t you? Careful though, I’d hate to pull down a cookbook by mistake. 

If Haig lets you browse parallel lives like a library card catalog, Ken Grimwood’s Replay makes you reread the same chapter with margin notes prewritten. Every time the calendar turns to 1988, 43-year-old Jeff Winston dies and awakens as his younger self in the 1960s on Emory’s campus in Atlanta. Happily, he possesses full recollection of his previous lives—the elusive fountain of youth! He garners wealth by exploiting financial foreknowledge, then sets off on different life trajectories. 

Jeff samples lives of immense wealth, egregious decadence, and altruistic fervor. He even manages to have Lee Harvey Oswald detained by the authorities, only to find that another assassin executes President Kennedy—did anyone say, “conspiracy?” When he finally survives beyond 1988, he is ecstatic to hear an unfamiliar tune and be completely in the dark about his future. Talk about stepping out of your comfort zone!

I particularly enjoy the unlikely plot of Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore.  Beginning in 1982, 19-year-old Oona leaps to another year of her life every New Year’s Day (her birthday), but she never knows where she will land. Since she lives her life out of chronological order, she goes from age 19 to 51 on her first disconcerting leap and then pinballs around each year through the six years detailed in the book.

The comedy writes itself in Freaky Friday fashion. Oona’s consciousness remains that of a 20-something, even as she inhabits older (but not necessarily wiser) versions of herself. Her abrupt vaults through time thrust her into awkward situations where others have a history with her, but she has none with them. For instance, she ends a very bad marriage one year, only later to experience the blossoming love that drew them together.  

Oona accumulates wealth through her market “clairvoyance” and samples a range of lives. She indulges recklessly one year and globetrots another. She never settles comfortably, knowing she will pull a Cinderella act at the stroke of midnight each December 31. 

In all three books, the message is the same: live in the present. Appreciate the life you’ve got. Don’t get lost in regrets or “what-ifs.” 

Lovely advice, noble even. But let’s not kid ourselves—if someone handed you the keys to a time machine, wouldn’t you at least check next Tuesday’s lottery numbers? Or go back and tell your mom how much you love her? Surely, you’d pass on that wide-lapelled, lime-green leisure suit in 1976. 

I’ve been thinking about which year I’d visit. Part of me wants to go back to age 28 and take that teaching position Georgia State offered me. Another part wants to leap ahead 20 years just to make sure I’m not shuffling down a corridor, subsisting on puréed vegetables. 

How about you? Would you like to pop back to see your parents’ courting or avoid buying Enron stock? Perhaps you’d like to be a carefree adolescent back when you knew everything. Maybe your curiosity is more modest: did they ever complete the Highway 74/54 construction?

These novels confirm what most self-help books and fortune cookies already preach: fulfillment lies in embracing the now, not fancifully rewriting the past or forecasting the future.  But why must acceptance preclude curiosity? 

These fictional lives, with their fractured chronologies and second chances, don’t weaken my resolve to live fully in my own timeline. Rather, they deepen my imagination of untaken paths and the allure of living with foreknowledge. Even though I can’t leap years, rewrite regrets, or browse life’s volumes in a celestial library, I can reflect, imagine, and, through fiction, inhabit other versions of myself. Past and future Dave meet my gaze in that magic mirror—and I can order anything off that menu. Care to join me for a taste?