"'I have smelled something like this before,' pondered Miles, 'yet
... not in this life. For ... in the way that certain odors can
instantly return us to earlier years ...'
"'Nasotemporal Transit,' nodded the savvy youth. 'There's a
seminar on that tomorrow, over at Finney Hall. Or do I mean day
before yesterday?'
"'Well, sir, this Smegmo concoction here takes me back even further
than childhood, in fact clear on back to a previous life, to before I
was even conceived--'" (AtD, Pt. II, p. 408)
"Against the Day" does include elements from all of Pynchon's other
books to such a degree as to effectivly knit them together into one
giant novel (just as all the internal cross-referencing in Mahler's
symphonies makes them all part of one giant symphony). The
title "In Search of Lost Time" could apply just as well to "Against
the Day", perhaps---what with all the time travel and wanderings
into hitherto imaginary lands, like Shambala, 1920's Hollywood
(furthur transposed into early Pulp Fiction) and the final. weird,
Bi-Location of modern-day Anarchist types upon Paris in 1920,
just around the corner from Marcel,---Proust's title applies to an
even greater degree to Pynchon's novel. I know there must be a
deeper well here, and if nothing else, Pynchon shares at least
one religious devotion with Proust:
"if God does indeed reside in the details, Proust
worshipped like a man on fire. "
Mark Kohut:
This is a great find re 'dayness' and ATD including History, etc.
....in many ways ATD is TRP's Remembrance of Things Past, yes?
http://tinyurl.com/2v2uu7
Notice, by the way, that it's Miles who experiences Nasotemporal Transit.
Miles is the Chum with "the gift".