We are lost to any sense of a continuous tradition.

[Robert Mahnke]

I saw this last night and thought it had curious echoes of AtD:

 

Perhaps history in this century, though Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers
in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the
bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern
anywhere else.  By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed
there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come
to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any
continuity.  Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles
of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the peculiar moral habits
of our grandparents.  We produce and attend musical comedies about them and
are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were.  We
are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition.  Perhaps if we
lived on a crest, things would be different.  We could at least see.

 

V. 155-56 (1986 ed.).

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