| Perhaps history
this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric
such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of
a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else.
By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are
others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume
greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus
it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's,
the curious fashions of the '20's, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents.
We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into
a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly
lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a
crest, things would be different. We could
at least see.
Thomas Pynchon (1963): V, p.155-56 |