Bloggame Suggestion

[jducoeur]

Whilst I attempt to calm down enough to keep the upcoming political rant well-focused, let's do something calmer. Here's a little intellectual exercise I sometimes indulge in, when I'm thinking about how things change, and how they don't.

Say that you have a time machine. But in order to prevent paradoxes, the only way you can interact with the past is by mentally communicating with people in their final moments, who can't pass on anything you tell them.

Pick a historical figure to talk to. What do you ask them, and what do you tell them? How do you expect them to react? Do you pick a great person and tell them what they accomplished? A villain to torment with their ultimate failure? Or just a normal person in the hurly-burly of normal life?

This line of thought brought to you by musings of how Henry VIII would have reacted, had he known that his child would solidify so much of what he set out to do -- but that it would be Anne Boleyn's daughter, not Jane Seymour's son, who did it. (I just finished a fascinating course on Henry's life and times. Now I really need to listen to the one that puts it in the context of what happened next...)

Comments

[mindways]

...huh. That's an exercise I also do. (Or the variant of "you can yank someone from the past into the present, at the time of their purported 'death'. They get as long or as short a time in the modern day as they want, but when they're done they return to the moment of their death.")

The one that always jumps to mind for me is Abe Lincoln - more to tell him about history after his death than anything else, though I'd certainly enjoy the chance for conversation - he died at kind of a crux-point, and from what I've read of the man I think he'd be relieved to learn how things turned out in the long run (though certainly grieved by some of the short-term events after his death).

For the pulling-forward variant, the one that usually jumps to my mind is Benjamin Franklin.