Time And Change

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is all about change and thus about experience.

When, in fifth century Britain, Everard of the Patrol presents the password, "'Man from tomorrow,'" the Jute guard complains, to Everard, "'It makes not sense,'" then to himself, "All these newfangled notions!"
- Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 36.

There was much change between the 1950's and the 1970's but:

"That Everard had been recruited [to the Patrol] in New York, A.D. 1954, and Nomura in San Francisco, 1972, ought to make scant difference. The upheavals of that generation were bubble pops against what had happened before and what would happen after." (p. 114)

When, in 2319, Carl Farness explains:

"'We'd spent our younger days in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, remember...No, you'd scarcely have heard, but that was a period of revolution in sexual mores.'" (p. 375)

- Dr Kwei-fei Mendoza of that era replies: "'Fashions come and go.'" (ibid.)

In 1986, Everard revisits Amsterdam, having not been there since 1952, and is warned that, "'Things have changed...'" (p. 478)

He asks himself:

"Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?" (p. 479)

It has been longer than thirty four years for him because he has joined the Patrol and visited:

the London of Elizabeth the First (we want to read that story);
the Pasargadae of Cyrus the Great (we have read that story);
many other times and places, some described in particular stories, others just mentioned.

I would like to know how long it has been for Everard but we are told that even he does not keep track:

"Everard hadn't told how much time his own farings through the world's duration added up to; and given the longevity treatment the Patrol offered its people, it was impossible to guess." (pp. 114-115)

I think that the Patrol does keep a record because it has to pay salaries for time worked:

"How did they figure years, though? Must be in terms of one's actual duration-sense." (p. 7)

Finally, for this post, on the theme of time and change, Everard thinks in 1990 that:

"The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Innuit. He had learned better than to return."
-The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 178.

Troy and Carthage: two lost cities, the latter very relevant to the Time Patrol. Attitudes differ, even in fiction. Jack Finney's nostalgic time travelers would want to go back to that 1942 Midwest and stay there.

I quote some of these passages from the Time Patrol series because of the beauty of their prose.