From Time to Time Read Online Free PDF

to a young woman born long before I was or even my parents. Because-according to Dr. E. E. Danziger, retired professor of physics from Harvard-time is like a river. It carries us forward through its bends, into the future ....but the past remains in the bends behind us. If so, said Dr. D, we ought to be able to reach it. And got himself a government grant to try.
    We are tied to the present, Dr. Danziger said, by countless threads-the countless things that make the present: automobiles, television, planes, the way Coca-Cola tastes. An endless list of tiny threads that tie us to now.
    Well, study the past, he said, for the same kind of mundane details. Read its newspapers, magazines, and hooks. Dress and live in its style, think its thoughts-all the things that make it then. Now find a place that exists in both times unchanged; "Gateways, he called them. And live in that place which also exists in the time you want to reach-dressing, eating, and thinking the way they did-and presently the ties holding you to the present will relax. Then blank out even the knowledge of these ties through self- hypnosis. And let your knowledge of the time you want to reach come flooding up in your mind. And there-in a Gateway existing in both times-you may, you just may make the transition.
    Most people failed, at the Project where we were trained. They'd try and-just couldn't. But I could, one of the very few. Made it back into the nineteenth century, returned to make my report, then went back to stay-to marry Julia, and live out my life in the nineteenth century.
    Now at our house, in familiar routine, Julia stepped on ahead up the stairs to unlock and open the front door for me; and in the hall she turned up the light. Then I passed Willy over to her because our dog-a fairly big woolly black dog with dabs of white here and there-was doing his little dance around my feet, trying to trip me for laughs. I let him out, and sat waiting on the front stoop while he wandered around, sniffing, checking to see that nothing had been changed out here. He's a fine fellow, called Rover, a fairly common name that hadn't yet become funny. Big black dogs, I'm afraid, are often Nig.
    Rover came back to sit down beside me, and I gave him his ear rub, which he accepted graciously, tongue lolling to show appreciation. I had various little routines with Rover, adding to and improving them from time to time, but it was best, I'd learned, to keep them out here. Julia is bright, quick-minded, and as subtle and perceptive as anyone. Yet one evening when old Rove came wandering in to join us in the sitting room, with a long thread of drool hanging from his black lips, I suggested to Julia that he might be an enchanted prince and that she ought to give him a big wet kiss to release him from his spell. But all I got for that was trouble, because her sense of humor, naturally, is pure nineteenth-century. One evening fairly early in our marriage we sat reading in bed, and she laughed aloud and pointed to what she'd just read in her newspaper. I leaned over and read it; it was a joke, a filler at the l)OttOI7fl of d column, the little Oi7flnibuses on Broadway and on Fifth Avenue are called stages by some, others call them buses, and the joke was: " Don't you think I have a good face for the stage?' asked a lady with histrionic aspirations. I don't know about the stage,' replied her gallant companion, but you have a lovely face for a buss.' " I imitated a chuckle, nodding my head very rapidly to suggest appreciation. As I once did at a Harrigan and Hart performance which was truly terrible, dreadful "faith and begorra Irishman jokes. But Julia actually cried from laughter, along with everyone else but me. I faked it.
    "I understand you're Man's Best Friend, I said to Rover now, there on the front stoop, and he agreed. ("Man's Best Friend was serious business here, a subject for sentimental newspaper poetry, which Julia no longer read aloud to me.) "But it seems to me, I told