The WreckIgnitons Read: About time

[David Morris]

The "time before death entered the world" would be the time before the
advent of conciousness.  Pynchon alludes to that time in GR. On page
229 the rats come out of their cages and perform the elaborate Busby
Berkeley-esque song and dance routine “Pavlovia.”

They dance in flowing skeins.  The rats and mice form circles, curl
their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns.

[snip]

Now it’s back to their cages and the rationalized forms of death –
death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that
it will die…  “I would set you free, if I knew how.  But it isn’t free
out there.  All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other
kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve
an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize about freedom, but the
least free of all.  I can’t even give you hope that it will be
different some day – that They’ll come out and forget death, and lose
Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form
of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable
level – and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive….”

David Morris


On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Let's discuss time. Annotations pony says Gaddis wanted to allude to phrases, lines from The Four Quartets all thru this novel.
>
> Eliot obsessed with time and eternity.  Time present, time future, 'back where we started knowing it for the first time"---famous line.
>
> Gaddis has this on pages 11-12....'a time before death entered the world" which Frazer sez exists conceptually in Every cultures myths and folktales.......
>