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DA2. Charles Simic and Time Travel Paradox

Statement

  • Your FIRST of TWO topic posts this week should be a reaction to The Atlantic article and Charles Simic. In this reaction give an example of this kind of search for meaning in your own life and culture.
  • Your SECOND topic, keeping in mind that is a round-table discussion, please post if you think Bruno (the penguin in the Time Travel Paradox video) could or could not kill his Grandfather.

Answer

Reaction to The Atlantic article and Charles Simic

Charles Simic is a widely recognized poet, his poetry won numerous awards. He wrote mainly in English; but also published many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry.

He published 60 books, some of them (UNH Library, 2008):

  • What the Grass Says (1967).
  • Jackstraws (1999).
  • Walking the Black Cat (1996).
  • A Wedding in Hell (1994).
  • Hotel Insomnia (1992).
  • The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1990) for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry;
  • Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990).
  • Unending Blues (1986).

I did not have a chance to read much of his poetry, but looking at the title and from what I read while researching, Simic tried to find meaning in life through dark humor; what he had seen during the war greatly affected his writing, and made him live in constant anxiety.

In such situations, your life can be taken at any minute so you start to look for humor in the darkest hour, in the hope that this will relieve some of the anxiety or fear.

I descend from the Middle East, a lot of tragedies happened in the last decade; and following social media, I can see that consuming dark humor has increased significantly. Unfortunately, this will not solve the problem and the bomb will not change its direction if you laugh at it; but laughing can facilitate the pain and make it easier to bear.

Bruno and the Time Travel Paradox

The time travel paradox is an interesting one; to summarize, the paradox involves a penguin who has managed to travel back in time to kill his grandfather to prevent some problems that have happened in the future. The paradox is that if the penguin kills his grandfather, then he would never have been born to kill the grandfather.

Assuming time travel is possible, the idea of parallel universes is suggested, where the penguin would be able to kill his grandfather in a parallel universe, but not in the universe he came from. This raises a question some questions: if the penguin kills his grandfather, would he be able to return to his original universe? If he does, would he be able to see the changes he made? If he does not, would he be able to live in the new universe?

I don’t think that he will be able to kill his grandfather, even if we assume time travel is possible. It is not a single event that needs to be changed, but rather the entire history of every person, object, and event that grandfather was, or will be, involved in. Such a task is super complex and requires power beyond the imagination of humans, let alone a penguin.

References

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