ATDTDA (18): 493-494 "captivated by eyes"

[Monte Davis]

> He conjugates Greek "in obscure gnomic tenses" to mentally distract
himself, but it doesn't work.  
>  A gnomic tense is one used to state an apparently universal truth, I
think - in Greek, usually worded  
>  in a present or future tense form. He's looking for universal platitudes
to calm himself ...
 
I'd never looked up "gnomic" before, but had inferred from context over the
years that it meant kinda "proverbial" oracular," kinda "oracular", with a
soupcon of "notes from the underground" 'cause that's where gnomes live when
they're not being stolen from gardens to go on tour.
 
Then,  from one year of college Greek long ago,  I half-remember the gnomic
as one flavor -- more a sense than a tense -- of the aorist. Google takes me
to Arnold Zwicky, writing at the inestimable Language [b]Log:

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Somewhat more subtly, if we're picking out tenses on the basis of meaning,
why don't we say that "I leave at noon tomorrow" and "I am leaving at noon
tomorrow" illustrate two more future tenses (rather than saying that they
are futurate uses of the present tense)?  And why don't we say that English
has several more tenses -- for instance, a gnomic tense, for (putatively)
universal truths ("Ice melts at 32 degrees F."), a narrative tense, as in "A
panda walks into a bar,...", and still others?  The usual way people talk
about these phenomena is as "uses of the present tense", and that's
basically right.  But how do we avoid calling these things different
"tenses" simply because they have different kinds of temporal reference?..
 
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004529.html
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And Google Books takes me to Alfred Sheffield's 1912 "Grammar and Thinking:
A Study of the Working Conceptions in Syntax" [which I gotta read now], pp.
133-135:
 
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Thus in abstract or general statements -- man is mortal, birds fly -- the
verb is really tenseless, although it is formally in the present...
 
The Past is more accurately distinguished as either 'preterit' or
'imperfect.' The preterit (in Greek grammar, the aorist) expresses simply
past occurrence... The Greek aorist of verbs asserting a state or condition,
generally expresses entrance into that state; as 'I became king"...  [the
aorist] has also a gnomic use, implying either that what opnce happened
always happens in like cases, or that what never did happen, never does (cf.
'Faint heart ne'er won fair lady')...
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Yoicks! Does anybody else feel an elbow to the ribs in that that grammatical
(rather than eschatological) sense of "preterit[e]", surelty one of
Pynchon's signature words in GR -- and signature themes throughout? It is no
accident, as they say, that the same word points to "happened in the past,
can't be changed" and to a fine point of Christian doctrine (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preterism ). Which in Old High Pynchonian means
more or less "damned" as distinct from -- but necessary to give meaning to
-- "saved."
 
So: we have here a very typical bit of TRP's pseudo-erudition. To be precise
and pedantic, you cannot "conjugate" a Greek verb in a [or the] "gnomic
tense," obscure or otherwise, because the Greek word formation is exactly
the same as the plain vanilla aorist.
 
But because he's Pynchon and not me or thee, poke around a little and you
realize you're hearing something very significant about Cyprian -- a
character who tried or tries or will be trying in every possible way to step
out of time into timelessness, or out of sex into love, or out of a war into
a monastery.
 
Or out of the imperfect day into something against it. 
 
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