The Time Traveler’s Reverie

Professor Chet Baker looks through the magnifying glass at the worn pages of the ancient manuscript, slowly making out the faded Greek words one by one. As he reads, a story unfolds that transports him back twenty-three hundred years to the palace of Alexander, King of Macedonia, who is preparing his army to invade Mesopotamia, Persia, and regions beyond.

Immersed in the details of Alexander’s campaign, the battles, the carnage, and the triumphant march of his armies across much of the known world, he reads deep into the night, lost in quiet reverie.

By dawn’s early light, the last words whisk him from the ancient world back to the present day—to his stark little college study where his time travel adventure began.

Back to the boring daily life of a college history professor, teaching disinterested students who couldn’t care less about civilizations of old. Back to the so-called “Information Age,” replete with misinformation, apathy, and despair.

“If only I had been born in another time,” he laments. “Any other time in history but now.”