Center of Gravity

[jeff severs]

OUTRSPACIA writes:

>And this idea of "feeling a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been
>skirting," "never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his
>time," sounds like a writer who has found his place, a writer who has hit his
>stride, a writer who sees at least in one white blinding moment, that he
>has/is creating something greater than he might have imagined. Slothrop is
>Pynchon here in this moment.
>
Being inside/outside time is a favorite turn of phrase in GR, especially in
this Mittlewerke tour passage. About 8 pages earlier, on 303 (Penguin), in
what has become perhaps my favorite passage, TRP sez: "it was always easy,
in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but
these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or
isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no
time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the
absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated
[...]"

"Panic wilderness fear" in open places sounds like a sort of Romantic
sublime. (Take a look at Marc Redfield's work, focused on _V._, on this
topic.)

To take things literally: the book itself takes place "after the capital
has been evacuated." So, yes, a center here, maybe, but a center that is a
"lateness and an absence"...

The whole thing makes me think of a nuclear holocaust -- "when there is no
more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to." The
Mittlewerke, as a terribly strange museum, seems to me to presage an event
for which there will be no museums. Can Slothrop here be sensing total
destruction (a center, an absence) as the "true momentum of his time"?