-copied from here.
"...we should not, I think, be human, if now and again we did not remember the old days and wish them back. 'O, call back yesterday, bid time return.'"
-Dornford Yates, The Berry Scene (London, 1947), CHAPTER X, p. 257.
"The old days," "old times" and "bid time return" must be the most evocative of short phrases, even explaining belief in the Resurrection. Someone died but it is believed that he is alive. A colleague heard that a friend had died, dreamed that he was alive, wanted to tell everyone, then woke up...
Authors can make time return. Poul Anderson wrote the Captain Flandry series, then the prequel, the Young Flandry Trilogy. Anderson's Manse Everard lived through World War II, then revisited it as a time traveler. Even without time travel, Everard revisits Amsterdam after a thirty-four year absence and is warned that things have changed. The time travel is relevant because it means that the absence has been even longer for him. He has been in the London of Elizabeth the First and the Pasaragadae of Cyrus the Great "since" his 1952 visit to Amsterdam:
"Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT p. 479.
"Innocence lost" is the consistent theme of the Time Patrol series.
Because I am plugging Dornford Yates as a (partly) kindred spirit to Poul Anderson, I want to show how he also bids time return. On the opening page of his third Berry book, Berry And Co., the five continuing characters are together again at their country home for the first time in five years, after the Great War. They recognize both old and new faces in church. Three volumes later, And Berry Came Too is set during the summer between the first and second chapters of Berry And Co. Another two volumes later, The Berry Scene reviews the entire period from before the Great War into the characters' old age.
Bid time return...
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I could be pedantic and point out that Anderson wrote sequels to the older Flandry stories besides the Young Flandry prequels. I mean "Outpost of Empire," THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN (despite these two stories not being about Flandry), A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS, A STONE IN HEAVEN, and THE GAME OF EMPIRE.
Sean
Sean,
Oh yes, sequels as well. Having read a story, we are interested both in what happens after and in what happened before.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And there are so many questions we don't know the answers to in the van Rijn and Flandry stories! Everything from knowing almost nothing about Old Nick's youth to what was the name of the Empress Dowager discussed by Admiral Kheraskov in THE REBEL WORLDS.
And I liked your suggestion that "Outpost of Empire" and THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN would be naturally collected in a COMPLETE COLLECTED WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON in a volume called OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE.
Sean
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