"'Yes, it continues to puzzle me,' Roswell agreed, 'this irrational worship of the Geneva movement, and the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock--as if there could be no other way. Watches and clocks are fine, don't mistake my meaning, but they are a sort of acknowledgement of failure, they're there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time, the tickwise passage of time in one direction only and no going back...." -- Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 456-7)
Now I know why I've never been able to wear a watch: I like going to the movies, but would hate to live in a movie. Music, on the other hand, not being governed by inexorable forward motion of a maltese cross, is all about the possibility of time travel both forward and back.
3 comments:
Exactly. Dig my Berg profile picture.
Did you finish the Pynchon yet? How does it stand in relation to his other stuff?
No, I haven't finished yet (I'm up to p.807).
AtD reads more smoothly than the other novels (the novella CoL49 excepted; Gravity's Rainbow, as you probably know is the just about the hardest book to start and then it soars in the middle only to come crashing down at the end, just like the curve of a rocket). AtD is to some extent a clarification and filling-in of themes traced elsewhere. But it is uniquely an hommage to to genre fiction (from boy adventurer series to proto-sci-fi to westerns etc.) and the anarchist sympathies are close to my heart. So, yes, I like like it very much.
So do I, and I'm only up to page 300.
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