GR translation: feel your age delivered into a new kind of time

[Monte Davis]

Definitely both: the musical context supports the sense of a new musical
time signature [tempo], and the WWII context ("Lindy-hop into the pit by
millions") supports the sense of... not just an era or epoch changing, but
one kind of historical awareness morphing into another.

(This is one of the most remarkable passages in GR, and attending to it
again just generated my 118th new response:

 One of the core logical/philosophical objections to time travel -- to
treating time as a dimension fully analogous to spatial dimensions -- is as
old as H. G. Wells' story. In space, "travel" or "movement" *MEANS* change
of position with time. So doesn't the idea of travel through time imply a
meta-time for your "travel" to "happen in," implying an infinite regress?

Philosophy goes about its (worthy and necessary) task of putting warning
signage on these tricky spots. Pynchon, from the beginning, has been doing
some of his most spectacular somersaults over what we mean by time. I'm not
committed to any specific narrative about him and Nabokov at Cornell, but I
would bet my life that while working on GR he read and learned and took
confidence from (at least)  the rewritten Speak, Memory (1966) and Ada
(1969), in both of which N does just that kind of acrobatics.

On Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 3:31 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> V471.33-472.3, P479.27-39   . . . she looked at him once, of course he
> still remembers, from down at the end of a lunchwagon counter, grill
> smoke working onto the windows patient as shoe grease against the rain
> for the plaid, hunched-up leaky handful inside, off the jukebox a
> quick twinkle in the bleat of a trombone, a reed section, planting
> swing notes precisely into the groove between silent midpoint and next
> beat, jumping it pah (hm) pah (hm) pah so exactly in the groove that
> you knew it was ahead but felt it was behind, both of you, at both
> ends of the counter, could feel it, feel your age delivered into a new
> kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest, the graceless
> expectations of old men who watched, in bifocal and mucus
> indifference, watched you lindy-hop into the pit by millions, as many
> millions as necessary. . . .
>
> Here the word 'time" is used in the sense related to music, is that
> correct?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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