We are lost to any sense of a continuous tradition.

[Mark Kohut]

Perhaps if we
> lived on a crest, things would be different.  We could at
> least see.
> 
Do the Chums "live' on a crest, so to speak?


--- On Wed, 7/23/08, Robert Mahnke <robert_mahnke at earthlink.net> wrote:

> From: Robert Mahnke <robert_mahnke at earthlink.net>
> Subject: We are lost to any sense of a continuous tradition.
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2008, 8:05 AM
> 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.).