Timeslips in the fjords

 

A couple of years ago, I read an interview with the British novelist Alan Garner, known for his novels blending reality and folklore. He described how he had been walking in the mountains and suddenly did not recognise his surroundings even though he was in a part of the mountains that he knew well. Some friends of his working on quantum mechanics had attributed this to a timeslip, a sudden travel in time. I remain sceptical of the possibility to traverse the unfolding of time, especially as a historian who will happily concede that history rhymes but that it never repeats and that it is inaccessible save by whatever vestiges survive the vicissitudes of time and chronological progress.  

I was reminded of this interview earlier this year, when I experienced a phenomenon that is in many ways similar to a timeslip, yet which works very differently. This happened late in the evening at the verge of early spring, when there was no snow in the lowlands yet a sere, crisp frost that reminded me that winter had not yet relinquished its claim to the land. I was walking the dog, and we were on our way back from the other side of the innermost bay in the fjord, where there is a shipwright that can be seen in the pictures below as a stretch of light on the right-hand side of the photographs. All of a sudden, I felt that time had blended into itself, and that the world I was walking through contained all times at once as preserved in glass. It was a strange feeling, but a comfortable one, and something I have felt several times before when walking in the fjords.  

This was not a timeslip in the strict sense, and it was more similar to a déjà vu in that I recognised this time as something familiar. However, it was not that I felt that I had experienced this moment before, but more that I experienced times that I knew from stories and photographs, times from before my own entrance on the earthly stage.  

My sensation was, of course, entirely in my head, and the experience itself was very much rooted in a historical moment. I was walking a road that had not been completed until sometime in the 1920s, covered in tarmac that had not been applied until decades later, and the constellation of lights from streetlamps and houses could only stem from the pattern of inhabited and functioning buildings in the year 2026. My timeslip was internal, as it were, and brought on partly by tiredness, but also partly by that strange blend of chronological conglomeration that is typical of the Norwegian fjords. While several buildings are new, and while roadworks, machines and infrastructure point squarely to the 2020s, and even though the centre of my native village is radically altered from its appearance in - say - 1926, there are also numerous reminders of past times: Some errant stones brought by the ice thousands of years ago that have not yet succumbed to the dynamite of construction workers, a few houses that were built in the 1920s, the church from 1875-76, and the mountains that have looked the same in living memory. When I grew up here in the fjords, I noticed this conglomeration in the houses in which I grew up and the houses that I visited. There were keepsakes, furniture, pictures, textiles, and other items that had been passed down through generations, and that bore the stamps of their respective historical periods. 

It is against this conglomeration I see the sensation I felt that cold evening on the verge of spring. Because I have inhabited a world comprised of remnants from earlier times, it is easy to feel as if I know those times. I do not - the smells, the sounds, the tastes of those years have never reached me, however much and however vividly they have been replicated in handed-down clothes, in my grandmother's cooking, or in the dialect of my grandmother's generation that is so distinct from that of my own - like a chronolect lost to the passage of time. I suspect that this feeling of familiarity surged into my head that evening because of the feeling of timelessness that comes with the seasons, the recognition that it is almost spring because it always feels this particular way when it is almost spring. In this way, chronological boundaries slipped away, even though I remained where and when I was. And this, I believe, is the way timeslips work in the fjords.