To be forgotten

...an excerpt from...
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
(1995)

Much as in this continuous process of consuming and being consumed, nothing endures, in Thomas Browne's view.  On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.  For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.  Knowledge of that descent into the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.  As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life.  To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day.  There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time.  The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us.  Hour upon hour is added to the sum.  Time itself grows old.  Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow.  Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names:  Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star.  Indeed, old families last not three oaks.  To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?  The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

That high magic to low puns: DT's to dt's

...an excerpt from...
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
(1965)

She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking's funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns prove ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sideways, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among "uhs" and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; "dt," God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him. She gave him goodbye, walked downstairs and then on, in the direction he'd told her.