MDMD: time

[Doug Millison]

Pynchon talks a little about time in his Sloth essay:

"[...] Philadelphia, by Franklin's time, answered less and less to the
religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was
becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods
and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of
regular city blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading into ambiguities
and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal. (Dickens, visiting in
1842, remarked, "After walking about in it for an hour or two, I felt that
I would have given the world for a crooked street.") Spiritual matters were
not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity! Sloth was no
longer so much a Sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular
sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible -- that is,
against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.
Poor Richard was not shy in expressing his distaste for Sloth. When he was
not merely repeating well-known British proverbs on the subject, he was
contributing Great Awakening- style outbursts of his own -- "O Lazy-bones !
Dost think God would have given thee arms and legs if he had not designed
thou shouldst use them?" Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse
beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put
off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity.
"You may delay, but time will not." And Sloth, being continual evasion,
just kept piling up like a budget deficit, while the dimensions of the
inevitable payback grew ever less merciful.
In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richard's day,
where every second was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in the
course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted the
ungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. In
Frances M. Barbour's 1974 concordance of the sayings, there is nothing to
be found under "Dreams," dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back then as
their frequent companion, sleep, which was considered time away from
accumulating wealth, time that had to be tithed back into the order of
things to purchase 20 hours of productive waking. During the Poor Richard
years, Franklin, according to the Autobiography, was allowing himself from
l A.M. to 5 A.M. for sleep. The other major nonwork block of time was four
hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, "What good have I
done this day?" This must have been the schedule's only occasion for
drifting into reverie -- there would seem to have been no other room for
speculations, dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine
was supposed to be nonfiction. [...]"

http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html
>From The New York Times Book Review
6 June 1993