Imaginings

Saturday, January 23rd., Hotel Russie, Rome.

I didn't begin work until 6 p.m. Lunch at the hotel. Then we went for a drive, Dorothy's idea. Right down the right bank of the Tiber to the place where I moored the Velsa before the war. Much interested to see this again. It was a good spot.

In conversation Dorothy asked me an interesting question: "If you could go back in time for one day, in Wells's time machine say, where would you choose to go?" I found this difficult to answer because there are so many things to consider. To gain time I asked a few clarifying questions: observing or participating, visible or not, all day or just daylight hours? Then I settled on Athens during the Greek 'Golden Age' with the Parthenon just built and philosophers aplenty. She opted for Rome at the time of Augustus. Predictable choices.

But since then I have been thinking it over, and have changed my mind. Of course I would love to see Athens in its glory, and Rome. And I would like to visit Elizabethan England, and Florence during the Renaissance. But I know quite a lot about these places and times, and they would, in a sense, be familiar. So, if asked now I would settle instead on one of the Mayan cities in Central America, Palenque or Copan. I well remember reading, and being enthralled by, John Lloyd Stephens' account of his travels in that region, especially the arrival at Copan. It seems to me that to spend a day in one of those places would be quite alien, exciting and unlike anything I could imagine. I salivate, metaphorically, at the prospect!

Of course Haggard, and similar 'romantic' writers imagined such places and peopled them, but generally it seems to me the people were really modern day people transposed. I don't think any author has successfully imagined himself into a different way of seeing and living in the world; perhaps it is not possible to do so. Certainly I could not do it.