| 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 |