Perhaps history this century

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of the fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else.

By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartemented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits our grandparents.

We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are connected into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 198, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)