Time, string theory, and everything

[Front-Ranger]

What about the harmonica that is flattened by a lucky throw from the touchy mare. The harmonica theme is expanded by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana in the movie. Interestingly, AP chose a similar instrument, the accordion, and focused an entire novel on it, Accordion Crimes.

"Flatness" occurs in the very first part of the story...Jack comes from Lightning Flat. The harmonica is introduced during the mountain scenes, and then flatness comes up again at the end. Jack is "pumping up a flat" when it supposedly explodes and the tire rim hits him in the jaw. He dies by suffocation...blood fills his lungs.

Also, in the prelude of the story, the wind, which has been wailing around Ennis' trailer, temporarily "dies" leaving a brief silence, while Ennis has been dreaming about his old sheepherding partner on the mountain. Does flatness refer to lack of wind (breath)? Or does it mean more than that, the "flattening" that is caused by our being beaten down by life, being "hit by the hammer of life" as AP refers to it?

[Front-Ranger]

I'm just now delving into Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which promises to satisfy my craving to learn about the congruence of science and spirituality. Check out the first few pages, which marvel at the motley assemblage of ordinary atoms that came together to make...us!!

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171#reader_0767908171

[Front-Ranger]

Hmm, I just encountered something similar in a book I am reading, The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein. The narrator, a dog, says, "Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present." In fact, it also reminds me of the prelude to Brokeback Mountain where Annie Proulx describes the older Ennis' reveries: "He let a panel of the dream slide forward." This concept of time being flat or maleable occurs here and there in contemporary fiction. I wonder if it has to do with the growing popularity of string theory.

These days I'm really enjoying the series on NOVA (public television) called "The Fabric of the Cosmos". One of the concepts presented is the theory that time does not actually flow like a river but is a string of snapshots much like a motion picture, strung together, and we can theoretically go back or forward within time, experiencing moments that will always exist frozen in time. That's a strangely comforting thought to me.