Living in time in Pynchon. If interested.

[Mark Kohut]

252 times the word 'time' appears in BLEEDING EDGE. Harried New Yorkers,
Maxine with
never enough time: her friend who is "not nearly time-obsessed
enough"....this time and that time
when she met and remet the folks of the story and this 'n that happened (or
didn't) this time.

Anti-nostalgia is a deep running theme in Bleeding Edge, I say. With
March,with Maxine herself,
with New York City as a character. P sez: face up to NYC and America now,
not then, and to your previous selves, now beyond self-nostalgia.
(P. Roth has his alter ego Not-Him-Really (wink-wink) characters proclaim
this--
hatred of nostalgia-- all over many of the early novels, I learn, reading
him hoping for some nostalgia re my earlier self, my bad)

And at least twice the fact that time makes us mortal and it is a human
value to live in time is overtly stated in BE.. (can't find, did not mark
the
exact phrasing and usages but I could find these related uses..."navigating
Time is an unforgiving discipline"..."a fluorescent bulb
on borrowed time" [nice allusion to Byron, no?].  I suggest this baseline
theme is played through all the works and is a
major part of his vision; a vision of earthboundness, a rejection of all
eschatologies that purport to release us from time.

I remember one early similar use in Gravity's Rainbow and I have just
reread Chap 1 of Against the Day which ends,

 "There are mysteries of the profession", Chuck supposed.
"You'll see. In time, of course."

( a pointed way of saying this, I say, which makes it P's
purest statement of the notion I expressed, I guess and
another statement of a major book-length theme of AtD expressed early.
Along with
the light and the dark)

Related to* Bleeding Edge's* particular uses-- because cyberspace is THE
other place
of* Bleeding Edge*, I learned from Jill Lepore's *These Truths* that when
the first computer(s)--
that famous IBM one was getting press post WW2, an article in the NYTimes
offered this:

"this machine [via its virtually instantaneous computation ability]
annihilates time."

No, I am not offering this as any kind of influence source for TRP, but
just an observation
shared by many, later including TRP, I say, about what computers can make
us feel ontologically
so to speak. Annihilating time matters to our worldly feelings.