What Time Period in History would you live?

I'd go to the late 1800's.

As I wrote elsewhere on this forum, "It may be too simplistic to romanticize any era (everyone knows nothing was always lovey-dovey, hunky-dory in any time, especially in the Depression-frought '30s and war-bound '40s), but it is equally simplistic, and specious, to de-romanticize any era, and too many films just seem to rejoice in doing so. (Pleasantville, a terrible, pretentious picture that I find wildly overrated, is a prime example.) It is for that reason that I find movies like Indy, The Rocketeer, Sky Captain, and last year's Allied to be such a breath of fresh air."

So, as is obvious, my ideal time period would be the 30s and 40s. I adore the era, always have, as much as I know its downsides. Every era has its downsides; the eternal problem, I feel, is that so many cannot see the downsides of the era that they are in at the time. That is what C.S. Lewis so rightfully called chronological snobbery, and it is far more common nowadays, I feel, than what movies like Pleasantville emphasize, the over-idealization, or lionization, of the past.

So, if Doc Brown asked me, that is what I'd let him know.

With that said, I'm fully aware that that's impossible and that one just cannot live one's life in the past. My belief, then, has been not to turn the modern age into the past but rather to bring the best parts of the past soaring into the present. As Eliot so beautifully phrased it in "Ash Wednesday," "But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down/ Redeem the time, redeem the dream/The token of the word unheard, unspoken/Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew."

Or, as I myself have (far less beautifully) written in my poem "Sic Transit," "Do not change the time./ How easy/to reform and deform,/to make and to take,/to destroy the imagination/of the ages, the received wisdom,/with all the precocity of youth./How easy./ Do not change the time./ Redeem the time, the poet said. / Transubstantiate the time."