Inspired by The Ghost Professor by Craig Miller
Suppose you had the chance to go back in time into your own past, not to relive it, but to see it for real. Not shrouded in nostalgia’s veil, but cut clearly in hindsight, wisdom, and regret. In The Ghost Professor, Dr. Gordon “Gordie” Kingman is granted that impossible privilege. A time machine, a series of trips through American history, and a second chance, not to alter what was, but to comprehend it. What he learns is not only the truth of history. It is his own.
Time travel, as Gordie discovers it, is more about perspective than physics. Each leap, from the smoky bars of 1961 Greenwich Village to the bustling streets of 1920s New York, from the quiet colleges of Minnesota to the chaos of Dallas in 1963, becomes a mirror reflecting his own evolution. He observes the birth of cultural icons, the shifting morals of America, and the steady corrosion of innocence. But behind each milestone in history, he is faced with the same chilling realization: we bring our own demons wherever, and whenever, we go.
These ghosts are not the supernatural sort. They are the resonations of decisions we made when we were ignorant. They are the “what-ifs,” the lost conversations, the roads not traveled. For Gordie, the ghosts manifest in his teaching career, in his relationships, and in his lifelong quest to comprehend time. Like us, he thought that knowledge could shield him from regret. But traveling through history teaches him the opposite: knowledge merely heightens empathy, and sometimes, grief.
When Gordie comes back to the present, he discovers that the world is unfamiliar. The morals that he taught are now in disarray. College has become commodified. Technology has displaced intimacy. His students learn equations but not human nature. In a way, he is no longer the man out of time; he is a ghost in his own life, drifting through the corridors of a system that has lost its sense of learning.
This is where The Ghost Professor goes beyond its science fiction setup. It is a reflection on how time itself is the best teacher. None of us can actually go back in time, but we do so in our imagination every day. We relive old fights. We rechoose career paths. We envision what could have been had we said “yes” rather than “no.” And as Gordie does, we know the past is never quite lost; it is stored in our minds, influencing us and how we perceive things.
“Living twice,” after all, is not about rewriting history. It is about reading it more tightly. It is about forgiving our younger self for what it did not know, and respecting the wisdom those decisions left behind. Gordie discovers that all timelines, no matter how faulty, are teachers. All regrets hold wisdom. All endings, even the subdued one that marks the end of a lengthy teaching career, hold the embers of new beginnings. Ultimately, we all live twice: once as we do, and once as we look back. The secret is finding a way to reconcile ourselves to both versions of ourselves and to accept that even our ghosts can help us learn.
