ATDTDA (5) (6?) 148/155 "Time itself was disrupted"

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

There's that line from Fleetwood Vibe:  "the bad dream I still 
try to wake from", which sounds just like history to me,         

             This quotation appears in Episode Two, during 
             Stephen’s conversation with Mr. Deasy. With 
             Sargent and his class earlier in Episode Two, 
             Stephen was the reluctant teacher, and now 
             Deasy attempts to position him as the pupil. 
             But Stephen blithely maneuvers out of this role 
             by way of a few cryptic statements, such as the 
             one above. Here, Stephen’s version of history 
             as a “nightmare” is an explicit challenge to Deasy’s 
             conception of history as moving toward one goal 
             (the manifestation of God), and an implicit challenge 
             to Haines’s version of history in Episode One as 
             something impersonal and cut off from the present 
             (“It seems history is to blame”). Stephen’s conception 
             of history has several meanings. Stephen sees history, 
             and Irish history in particular, as filled with violence—
             Deasy’s and Haines’s conceptions of history enable 
             this violence by excluding certain people from history 
             in Deasy’s case (those who do not believe in a Christian 
             God) and by absolving those who perpetrate violence 
             from any blame in Haines’s case. Stephen’s comment 
             also refers to his conception of the tensions between 
             art and history—Stephen sees history as an impossible 
             chaos and art as a way of representing that chaos in 
             an ordered fashion. Finally, Stephen’s statement is 
             also an extremely personal one—his own history is 
             something he is trying to overcome. At the opening 
             of Ulysses, Stephen is feeling particularly hopeless 
             about the possibility of rising above the circumstances 
             of his upbringing.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/ulysses/quotes.html#i1014393

So this passage must be a deliberate echo, pointing back to its source.

             "Time itself was disrupted, a throughgoing and merciless 
             forswearing of Time as we had known it, as it had safely 
             ticking for us moment into moment, with an innocence 
             they knew how to circumvent. . . ."
             It was understood at some point by all the company that 
             they were speaking of the unfortunate events to the north, 
             the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought 
             to sorrow and ruin." 148

And the following scene is a depiction of time, if not being disrupted, 
at the very least being rendered non-linear, enabling Hunter's escape.

             How stupefied he must have looked. He followed the 
             group dumbly down a flight of winding metal steps to 
             an electric-lit platform where others, quite a few others 
             in fact, were boarding a curious mass conveyance, 
             of smooth iron painted a dark shade of industrial gray, 
             swept and sleek, with the pipework of its exhaust 
             manifold led outside the body, running lights all up and 
             down its length. He got on, found a seat. The vehicle 
             began to move, passing among factory spaces, power 
             generators, massive instillations of machinery whose 
             purpose was less certain---sometimes wheels spun, 
             vapors burst from relief valves, while other plants stood 
             inert, in unlighted mystery---entering at length a system 
             of tunnels and, once deep inside, beginning to accelerate. 
             The sound of passage, hum and wind-rush, grew 
             louder, somehow more comforting, as if confident in its 
             speed and direction. There seemed to be no plan to stop, 
             only to continue at increasing velocity. Occasionally, 
             through the windows, inexplicably, there were glimpses of 
             the city above them, though how deep beneath it they 
             were supposed to be traveling was impossible to tell. 
             Either the track was rising here and there to break above 
             the surface or the surface was making deep, even heroic, 
             excursions downward to meet them. The longer they traveled, 
             the more "futuristic" would the scenery grow. Hunter was on 
             his way to refuge, whatever that might have come to mean 
             anymore, in this world brought low. 155

Sounds like a ride developed at Candelbrow U.

As Michael Silverblatt's fine review (just posted by Ya Sam) points out:

             For all of the extraordinary research he has done, 
             the geopolitics, the maths and sciences, the languages, 
             Pynchon seems to be traveling back in time to look for 
             an escape route. He wants to find the turning point on 
             time’s axis that will prevent the world from turning into 
             the materialistic and ignorant Hell it is today. He is 
             exploring the past to take refuge in the memory of what 
             could have been. Reader, beware!

http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Stimuli/michael_silverblatt_on_books_003