I stepped into the world of Stephen King, just testing the waters, and was promptly swept off my feet and rendered absolutely speechless by his 11/22/63. That’s not just a dandy expression, either; I really have no idea what to say. Should I praise this magnificent author on his success in creating such a detailed, well-rounded, and altogether complete world? In truly making me believe I was by the side of George Amberson/Jake Epping in the America of the fifties and sixties? In causing me to miss that world, causing me to wake up each morning and realize with disappointment it was 2016? But then I’d have to launch into the brilliantly developed characters, and of course that would force me to applaud King’s exhaustingly extensive research on Lee Harvey Oswald and his family and the town of Derry and the city of Dallas. Perhaps it would be better just to explain how it made me think.

It all started when Jake Epping, your run-of-the mill thirty-five-year-old English teacher trying to scrape together a living, got a call from Al, the owner of local hamburger stop Al’s Diner. He arrived at the little trailer to find Al going gray and wheezing like crazy. There he learned that Al had found a time portal to 1958 in his pantry, was using it to buy really cheap beef, and had been planning to stay in the past long enough to prevent the assassination of JFK. But that’s not all. Thanks to his smoking habit, he’d been diagnosed with severe lung cancer and knew he wouldn’t make it to that fateful day in Dallas in 1963. So of course the weight of the task now fell to Jake. As with any time travel book, the mind-boggling speech describing all the rules of the portal and bringing stuff back from the past and such was made and then our hero valiantly stepped into the smog and sunshine of Maine nearly six decades ago (under the alias of George Amberson, of course).

The driving concept for George/Jake and the story in general was something dubbed “the butterfly effect.” This was the idea that any tiny thing you said or did in the past spread, affecting the future in ways beyond comprehension. Picking up a newspaper in a café instead of just ordering a coffee, telling the taxi driver to keep the change instead of taking the time to count it out, crossing the street instead of staying on the sidewalk, nodding hello to that woman with the baby instead of staring straight ahead...each choice was a butterfly spreading its wings and fluttering away to who knows where to tell who knows who. Understandably, this caused George/Jake some paranoia. How would his every action impact the world of 2011, the world to which he would eventually return? What if some offhand remark wiped out his very existence? It was terrifying to fathom, and my stomach did somersaults on each page.

Until I realized something: I go through that each day. So do my friends, my teachers, my family; so does every human on this planet. So do you. No, we’re not living in the past. No, we don’t have to worry about causing ourselves to never be born. But there is no map of the present to guide us, no journal filled with notes from some cancer-stricken hamburger chef telling us who wins the world series or what lottery numbers are drawn. We live our lives blindly, each decision we make changing the future ever so slightly. We never know what those changes are or what might have happened if we hadn’t acted as we did—the only device we ever have is regret, the ability to look back and wish we’d made a different choice. Hindsight is 20/20, after all. Maybe by telling a friend her hair looked nice gave her just the confidence she needed to join student council, which blossomed into her running for class president, which developed her interest in politics, which led her to graduate pursue a law degree, which enabled her to win her state election, which turned her into a successful leader, which allowed her to voice her opinions and marginally change the world. All because you said a few select words at a certain time on a certain day. Who knows how many people you’ve helped? How many you’ve hurt?

Such thinking gave way to contemplation on another subject. Throughout the book, “changing history” was a motif. The day that would change history, the man that would change history, the gunshot that would change history. Every dictionary I looked in agreed that history was a thing of the past, be it the study of past events or simply events of the past. You cannot, therefore, change history. History is done, history is behind you. Lee Harvey Oswald did not change history—that is only how we perceive it today, with our generalized and careless language, but on 11/22/63 all he succeeded in changing was the future. He, just like every human, lived in the present. Unless you know a guy with a time portal in his pantry, of course, all you have control over is the moment you’re in and the countless moments to follow. Maybe it’s time we gave those precious seconds more credit.

“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.”
-- Stephen King, 11/22/63