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[Michael Bailey]

 Mark Kohut wrote:
> One might summarize a major thematic thrust of Against the Day
> as The Metaphysical Clubbing.........
>
> He takes out just about all higher religiuous, philosophical thought
> in comic spoof after spoof. Within his outrageous conceits, he
> throws off analogies indicating same. Re Quaternions vs.Vectorists,
> he says " like a religious war",for example.
>

 browsing Kit's arrival at the quaternion convention today, I noticed
also a comparison of the quaternionists to anarchists, and vectorists
to Bolsheviks.

"Of course we lost.  Anarchists always lose out, while the
Gibbs-Heaviside Bolsheviks, their eyes ever upon the long-term, grimly
pursued their aims, protected inside their belief that they are the
inevitable future, the xyz people, the party of a single Established
Coordinate System, present everywhere in the Universe, governing
absolutely.  We were only the ijk lot, drifters who set up their
working tents for as long as the problem might demand, then struck
camp again and moved on, always ad hoc and local, what do you expect?"
 (534)

right before this (anachronistic, probably - it isn't Bolshevik time
yet when Kit lands, is it?) there's also "We are the Jews of
mathematics, wandering out here in our diaspora." (533)

and then there's the set of parallels of mathematicians to writers -
Hamilton likened to Swinburne (535)