––What do you imagine would be the best part of living then?

Birkerts: I like the idea of a genuine critical mass of alert humanity, rather than its virtual stand-in, and the sense, too, that the future is still vitally in formation and that the earth has not been colonized to within an inch of its life.

Gabriele: It would be amazing to watch how a city evolves, fast-forward. One day mail moves by horse and buggy, the next, a telephone line is installed. One day everyone lives by gas light, the next, electricity is strung up and pumped in. Mostly, how cool to be one of the few women who dare to venture north in search of personal fortune. I would have done that, as, no doubt, my options would have been limited to marrying young and moving directly from my father’s house to my husband’s. I would have read about the northern migration and fled home. I would like to think that I would have been entrepreneurial, opening a sewing shop or a restaurant or a school. But the whore’s money might have been too difficult to resist. Plus I’m a sucker for a corset and feathers.

Love: I think this whole ‘life-with-death’ mentality appeals to me primarily because I am super-duper scared of death. I’ve never managed to shake that childhood awake-in-the-dark-contemplating-mortality thing that most people manage to move past (or at least healthily suppress) in adulthood. I’m still totally bowled over – and kind of affronted – by mortality. So I think the best thing about living back then would be, basically, not being like this. Being able to look at life without the terror of death mangling my view.

Miller: I must be drawn to this era in part because of the manic revolutionary fervor in the air, and because, even then, people (OK: members of the white, male gentry, but still) seemed to have understood that they were living in a remarkable time. There seemed to have been a feeling that they were living in a precedent-creating era: they were remaking and reimagining the world. Not to sound too crotchety, but how often do we look around at this shallow, frivolous, lowest-common-denominator culture of ours––not to mention our sometimes criminal government––and feel that this is the best time ever to be alive? I mean, doesn’t every right-thinking person sort of have to believe that humanity has gone kind of gone backward? Also: late eighteenth-century clothes were super cool.

 
––What would be the worst?

Birkerts: The afore-mentioned fleas, still-primitive dentistry…

Gabriele: The smell. People reeked back then. One of the main pleasures of watching Deadwood was how the series accurately depicted the vile hygiene. Also bad would be the violence, especially against women. Despite my modern bravado, and all joking aside about prostitution, joining the gold rush as a woman would have been a horribly dangerous thing to do; rape was common, murder too. The overall lawlessness of an unformed society would have been stressful. But still, I’d have been game.

Love: As it turns out, I’m not actually a big fan of war and disease. I am TERRIFIED of the bubonic plague. Way more than it is reasonable to be terrified of a disease that hasn’t claimed a victim in centuries. Also, I get cold really easily and I don’t much like the heat either. In general, I’m not much of a trooper, physically speaking. And not being able to read. I find it hard to imagine life being all that enjoyable without books. Maybe if I could be a scullery maid in a monastery (did they have scullery maids?) and a big-hearted, forward-thinking monk could secretly teach me philosophy and theology and some alchemy for good measure at night. That sounds pretty appealing. But there’d still be war and disease to contend with.

Miller: Obviously, it wasn’t such a great time to be a woman. (On the upside, I would have probably gotten very good at those needlepoint alphabet primers you always see on tours of old houses.) And, boy, would it have sucked even more to be black or Native American. What else? Well, there was no anesthesia, the public hygiene was hideous, the lifespan was forty, women could almost be guaranteed an eventual death in childbirth, you were up at dawn and in bed at dusk, the last meal of the day was at 3 pm, you ate what you grew or killed, and you were pretty much entirely self-sufficient (which might not have been such a bad thing, really). There were no pharmaceutical drugs. But there was lots and lots of alcohol. But no Stephen Sondheim. And I’m firmly of the mind: If there’s no Sondheim, what’s the point?