TUMBLR

A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...

Dec 06, 2012

Michael Herr, Dispatches

[Day Tripper] was on his helmet… and on the back, where most guys just listed the months of their tours, he had carefully drawn a full calendar where each day served was marked off with a neat X.

Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time. (No one ever talked about When-this-lousy-war-is-over. Only “How much time you got?” The degree of Day Tripper’s obsession, compared with most of the others, could be seen in the calendar on his helmet. No metaphysician ever studied Time the way he did, its components and implications, its per-second per seconds, its shadings and movement. The Space-Time continuum, Time-as-Matter, Augustinian Time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer.

Filed under: my reading year 2012

[Day Tripper] was on his helmet… and on the back, where most guys just listed the months of their tours, he had carefully drawn a full calendar where each day served was marked off with a neat X.

Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time. (No one ever talked about When-this-lousy-war-is-over. Only “How much time you got?” The degree of Day Tripper’s obsession, compared with most of the others, could be seen in the calendar on his helmet. No metaphysician ever studied Time the way he did, its components and implications, its per-second per seconds, its shadings and movement. The Space-Time continuum, Time-as-Matter, Augustinian Time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer.

Filed under: my reading year 2012