Thanks and

[Mark Kohut]

Michael Bailey writes:
  4) 749: Yashmeen (right?) writing to her father: "Professor
 McTaggart, at Cambridge, took what one must call the cheerful view [wha?!?],
 and I confess that for a while I shared his vision of a community of
 spirits in perfect concord, the old histories of blood and destruction
 evolved at last into an era of enlightenment and peace, which he compared
 to a senior combination-room without a master."
   
  I do not know how you found all the McTaggart uses without a search-inside helper.....
  (I guess the whople book kinda exists more or less AT ONCE in you.............timelessly,
  so to speak. Wow.
   
  You found the first use that yashmeen uses later........................and it sure seems to me
  that McTaggart is linked to Pynchon's notions of a self-organized group of 'souls" acting
  in concord without a Power structure, a hierarchy of Authority..................a group contrasted with the Spy Agency, at the least........yes?
  

Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
  David Payne wrote:
> Dang it all, where's an electronic, search-able copy of AtD when you need it?

eckshually, sometime in the last few months, Amazon has been allowed
to make AtD searchable...Thanks be!

>
> So, without searchable text, I find five references to McTaggart.

wow, I was only aware of the 2. I was just referring to the fact that
I've given short shrift to those, and now I find my ignorance is 250%
greater than I thought...


adding my also admittedly pitiful - and hideously verbose - takeaways inline...

>
> 1) 239: "It was raining when Lew arrived in Cambridge. Newspaper headlines announced [...difficult text to re-type regarding the Vatican's disapproval...] _'Multi et Unus'_ Complete Text Within"
>

somewhere in that section, they repair to a tavern called
The Laplacian, too, don't they?

Anyway, so the newspapers in Cambridge have headlines about
McTaggart (these would be, probably,
newspapers on an ethereal plane which is to the brick-and-mortar
Cambridge as the White Visitation is to the occult/military scene
in WWII England...) humorously mentioning a papal reaction
and Hardy's unresponsiveness to this (non-Rupert Murdochian,
well-staffed-science-coverage-department-endowed) paper's
apparent seeking of his reaction.

McTaggart and Hardy were both members of the Cambridge Apostles,
which though not overtly demonic like Skull & Bones, did achieve later
notoriety for homosexuality and Marxism (Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt
were both Apostles)

McTaggart was not a mathematician but a philosopher, although
apparently a respected logician. Building upon and differing with Hegel,
he did a lot of what looks to me like nitpicking about time...
but it does seem to apply nicely to an historical novel:

the A series - past present and future - a moment is in all 3 of these
states eventually...thus bringing in the notion of "change"
--"I am going to read AtD...I'm reading AtD right now!...I read AtD in 2007-8"

the B series- a steadfast arrangement of order, the weenie-bite
on page 666 is always before the heavenwide blast of light on page 779
so there isn't any change - hence, Time (the B series) doesn't really
exist as something
that changes things, it's just whatever page you're on, at the (oops) time...

and therefore to conceptualize the A series, you already have to
have a notion of the A series, so it's an infinite regress and
for some reason (I guess because he was a logician) he had a problem
with that and rather than saying, well it's built in, he said it's inconsistent,
therefore the very idea of Time is mistaken, both the A and B series.

then there's a C series, but that is just a B series where you could
start from either end - or like Robin, start in the Zone, read to the theater
and loop to the dream, but the pages are still in the same order.

I'm speculating that because he wasn't a mathematician, it didn't
occur to him that one could construct an algorithm to access the
sequence allowing skips, reversals, repetitions, etc....

which is what I think, like there's a big unignorable illusion of
Time, and then there is the private experience of Time that one
builds from desire, memory, anticipation....then there's maybe some
as-yet-unguessed Reality transcending all that...toward a
knowledge of which we may be building...or being drawn...
(by Tractor Beam --- "The Chums of Chance Aboard Time's DeathStar")

but I like this idea (also from the Wikipedia article)
"McTaggart concluded the world was composed of nothing but souls,
each soul related to one or more of the others by love."
-----with some jockeying, that could describe the plot of AtD...


> 2) 412: "Professor J.M.E. McTaggart of Cambridge, England, dropped by, to give a brief address dismissing altogether the _existence_ of Time as really too ridiculous to consider, regardless of its status as a a believed-in phenomenon."

---here is the paper from 1908 that is probably referred to in the text:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Unreality_of_Time

>
> 3) 452: "Everyone was converging upon McTaggart Hall, the headquarters of the Metaphysics Department [of Candlebrow U], whose storm-cellar was known throughout the region as the roomiest and best-appointed such refuge [from a repeating tornado] between Cleveland and Denver."
>

guessing that perhaps the calmness of McTaggart's approach
and the quality of his prose (even I could read "The Unreality of Time")
makes his work a bulwark against Unreason

> 4) 749: Yashmeen (right?) writing to her father: "Professor McTaggart, at Cambridge, took what one must call the cheerful view [wha?!?], and I confess that for a while I shared his vision of a community of spirits in perfect concord, the old histories of blood and destruction evolved at last into an era of enlightenment and peace, which he compared to a senior combination-room without a master."
>

any McTaggart scholars able to source this obiter dictum?
Betcha there's an antecedent or hint somewhere in reality.

> 5) 933: "'Sounds like John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart all over again,' she [Yashmeen arguing (?) with Ratty], muttered."
>
> A couple of my admittedly pitiful take-aways:
>
> * John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart is an absolutely hiccupped ridiculous name with a hiccupped history.
>

but with good reason: McTaggart's father made him change his last name
as a condition of inheriting from his uncle.
There's a load of emotion in that simple fact: consider, his uncle passed away
while McTaggart was still subject to his father's demands - hence, greater
grief, dying young. Respect: his father didn't have to do that, and
McTaggart raised no
objections. Family solidarity: the uncle must've been childless and
McTaggart carrying the name would be the only way the man would
reach into posterity.

> * McTaggart was, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._E._McTaggart), "a friend and teacher of Bertrand Russell" of the Russell's Paradox, "the set of all sets that do not contain themselves as members" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox) -- a notion that pops up (explicitly) at least twice in the text (again, where's a searchable text when you need it?).

Some absolutely splendid thinking in those days...
Pynchon nods to the polymath Cantabridgians and Oxonians in GR
with Dodson-Truck...




       
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