ATDTDA (16): Praxis, 455-458

[Paul Nightingale]

Roswell complains of “clock movies, elapsing from the beginning of the reel
to the end, one frame at a time” (457), echoing Merle’s thoughts on 451
(“There had to be something more direct ...”): “next thing they knew, they
had wandered miles up the river and paused by an ancient sycamore” (457).
Time ‘disappears’ as they talk, its passing ‘measured’ spatially by “miles
up the river”. There is no going back, in terms of their discussion, no way
of undoing knowledge, the point made earlier with regard to Roswell’s
invention (455). They are “hopping up and down and shouting at each other in
a curious technical patois” (457), blow/counter-blow, so to speak: or
thesis/antithesis? Anglers who should be motionless, move “up or downstream
of the disturbance”, while college girls “[pause] ... to gaze”. Meanwhile,
“another storm [is] about to break”: is this again Thorvald, who “moved on
to more promising prey” on 456?

Meanwhile, at the conference, intense debate/argument. Thesis/antithesis
implies synthesis and some kind of ‘progress’: “At the end of the summer, it
would be these hardheaded tinkers 
 who’d come out of these time-travelers’
clambakes with any practical kind of momentum” (457-458), “practical” here
juxtaposed to professors’ “bookshelves and protégés” (458). So another
clash, between talk and action, talk in this sense going round in circles
(interrupted by Thorvald on 452, but quickly resumed). Whereas action is
progressive and therefore linear.