"People like you"
Whats that supposed to mean?
Honestly, it was the way you phrased it plus its a man, who has been elevated to the son of a god, and I think the mere mortal version couldn't live up to that if you tried.
I can also imagine going to Wembley to see Live Aid and getting miffed at the couple stood in front of you and being stuck right at the back and it 'not being as good as on the telly'.
And I'm not sure I'd much want to go back to certain places / points in time purely because of the smell and the violence (spectator to a major battle in the middle ages, no thanks. I don't fancy watching thousands of men go to grizzly, noisy painful death no matter what my curiousity about the age). I'm fascinated by history but I think when I think about it, I don't think I'd like to go to a lot of these places or meet a lot of these people.
Wilfred Owen in the trenches. Absoluetely not. I've done a lot of research into one of my great grandfathers and its absoluetely horrendous.
Shakespears premier. Apart from not really understanding the humour etc of the time fully, I think 21st Century expectations of theatre would get in the way, because we've been 'ruined' really.
If I think about being there for VE day, part of me thinks that actually it wouldn't be the same, because whilst you'd feel the excitement of everyone else you hadn't lived through it so it'd just be a party to us. The whole point is the moment of relief of knowing rationing would be coming to an end soon (of course it didn't for years, but thats your expectation), that you wouldn't have to live worrying about the next air raid or hearing of someone you knew dying. You had to be IN that moment rather than an observer outside of the context. Its a bit like an alien being parachuted in - you aren't experiencing what everyone else is, you are experiencing it from the role of 'outsider' and part of the point is not knowing the future.
Take the Berlin Wall falling, one of the bits about it is that moment of the world of opportunities and optimism opening up. Being here, on the otherside of that, its almost tainted because you KNOW whats going to happen (and lots of it doesn't live up to the hopes of the dreams of what you felt when the wall fell).
For the same reason, even cool events I lived through I'm not sure I'd want to repeat. They were a moment in time, that were special because they came in context. For example theres the buzz in the run up to the gig. There's being in a bubble of your community - the people you were with change it from a gig to something really special. Theres an element of youth that you can't recapture.
Even Bowie - I saw him in the ninties and it was hands down the best gig I went to. I'm not sure I'd want to see him earlier if the risk is to ruin my memories of the gig I went to.
As I said I wouldn't want to meet anyone famous, so I think I'm actually fairly consistent in how I feel this. I'd like to meet my ancestors because I don't have any expectations about them being anything 'special'. Its the ordinariness that interests me. And I absoluetely wouldn't want them to know who I was nor where I came from, because I wouldn't want to disappoint them.
And then there's elements of language. Whats the point in going to certain places if you aren't going to understand what people are saying, so thats evolution of language and language itself. Certainly this would be a problem understanding What Jesus Was Doing, even if we were there. Its knowing the 'in jokes' so to speak. And its knowing that not only does history have rose tinted spectacles but we build up a mythology / propaganda which almost can only disappoint us living in the future. Context is something we greatly underestimate.
The more I think about it, the more the idea of time travel, almost disappoints because its as much about your present and how we value things now as your curiousity about the past. Going back to Wilfred Owen, part of his poems effect is the tradgey of his own death - if you save him, you almost take away some of the power of his words because you know his life echoed his work - you think about how only five of his poems were published in his lifetime...
In someways the whole point that we are curious is because of the mystery of what we can't have. If we could time travel (and not disturb the past) I'm not sure it'd be the wonderful and amazing thing we percieve it would be full stop.
Meh.