GR translation: more steeply than the waking will ever need

[Paul Mackin]

On 10/28/2012 3:05 AM, jochen stremmel wrote:
> 2012/10/28 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>:
>> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 10:56 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> Although see how "waking" is used on p. 205..12::
>>>
>>> "For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of waking he has only lately begun to suspect."
>> That reminds me, what are these "ordinary debris of waking" anyway?
> Until now I thought Laura had the right answer (from the 12th of June):
>
> It's a nice thought experiment: you're sitting in a cluttered, really
> messy room, because you're pretty much of a slob (the room's filled
> with "the ordinary debris of waking.").  But then you're told
> (Slothrop only suspects) that someone has selected certain items in
> the room and moved them, slightly, without your knowledge, for
> purposes beyond your understanding ("Their" order) .  Which objects?
> Why?  That's how Slothrop feels.
>
> Seems still plausible to me.
>
> Perhaps we should ask Max what he made of the two wakings in his translation?
>

Yes and yes.

Can we view the uncanniness that Slothrop senses as the expression somehow, horror of horrors, of a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? The word "debris" kind of has the connotation  of something resulting from  a random dispersal.  Thus, the normal (waking) debris of the room is how gambling and related activities would be likely to arrange the furniture. etc. But what S believes he sees is not this expected "entropic arrangement" but something ominously different.

It's a thought.

P