From "Time's Breakdown," September 17, 2003—
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“… even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?” – The Professor, in “Passing in Silence,” by Oliver Humpage “Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.” – Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban) |
This flashback was suggested by
- A review in next Sunday's New York Times Book Review of a new novel, Point Omega, by Don DeLillo. The review's title (for which the reviewer, Geoff Dyer, should not be blamed) is "A Wrinkle in Time." The review and the book are indeed concerned with time, but the only apparent connection to the 1962 novel of Madeleine L'Engle also titled A Wrinkle in Time is rather indirect– via the Walsh functions mentioned above.
- A phrase in the Times's review, "frame by frame," also appeared in this jounal on Saturday. It formed part of the title of a current exhibition at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
- The Carpenter Center exhibition will have an opening reception on February 4.
- February 4 is also the birthday of the above Russell Hoban, who will turn 85. See a British web page devoted to that event.
DeLillo is a major novelist, but the work of Hoban seems more relevant to the phrase "frame by frame."