Just Finished Reading (for the 3rd Time) 11/22/63 by Stephen King

When I've read the same, pretty lengthy book three times in seven years...well, you can be pretty sure that it's one of my favorites.  That's the case with Stephen King's 2011 time travel novel 11/22/63, the title of which clearly alludes to the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas on that tragic Friday afternoon.  After just finishing reading it once again, I was reminded of what King repeatedly refers to as the obdurate past...

The protagonist, relating the story in the first person, is Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a small Maine town.  He has a friend, Al Templeton, who owns and runs his own small diner down the road and sells the best-tasting burgers for miles around at an impossibly cheap price.  What Jake doesn't know is that Al has long been aware of a time portal at the back of his pantry, through which he can slip back in time from 2011 to 1958...and back again.  He goes there, picks up his high-quality ground beef in the past at an extremely cheap price, and brings it back...a pretty uninspired use of something as significant as a door through time, I say.  Al eventually agrees, seeing that 1958 isn't that far off from 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated, and decides to do something to change history.  But circumstances of his own flagging health catch up with him and he asks Jake to perform the task of saving the president.  Only one problem: the past is obdurate, i.e. it stubbornly resists change and puts obstacles in front of our hero in proportion to the degree and pivotal significance of the change being sought...

Back in 2012 I wrote that it's not only the past that is obdurate, but also the future.  My rationale was that it seemed that every time I made a concerted effort to overhaul my life and significantly improve it, all kinds of challenges would arise to stymy me, challenges that seemed to randomly come out of thin air.  It was as if time were telling me what direction I had to live my life in and that it would not tolerate any deviation from the "plan".  Of course, you don't have to get too metaphysical about time being obdurate to changes in your life's goals and habits: people themselves tend to be resistant to others around them changing.  It reminds me of the great 1960s song Both Sides Now that Joni Mitchell wrote and Judy Collins turned into a big hit: "But now old friends are acting strange...they shake their heads, they say I've changed".  Whatever or whoever the cause, reality around us resists our proactive efforts to change ourselves and our environment...and you don't have to go 53 years back through a time portal to see that...