The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions

But ''older'' in Eliot’s lines could refer also to the age of mankind, to what many people see as the evolution and increasing complexity of the human world. In the twentieth century, indeed our world did become strange—the curved space-time of Einstein, the mysterious reality of the quantum, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the Freudian depths, the artistic revolutions of modernism and postmodernism, the strangeness of chaos and complexity theory, and—perhaps above all—the horrific traumas of two world wars. The twenty-first century, shadowed by 9/11, is proving no less strange. What about the search for ''pattern''? Many of us, I think, try to find some kind of pattern to the world: maybe a simple philosophy or a paradigm along the lines of Thomas Kuhn.{{efn|Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) used the idea of ''paradigm'' and ''paradigm shift'' in his ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions''. Although the term ''paradigm'' has been used for a long time in English, it is Kuhn’s usage that since the 1960s has become influential.}} For some, such a search might include some kind of faith commitment such as Judaism or Christianity.{{efn|I briefly examine religion as a form of patterning in the final paragraph below.}} But in our stranger, Alice-in-Wonderland, postmodern world, the struggle to find personally significant patterns is, for many, increasingly demanding. Unless one is persuaded by the more simplistic forms of Fundamentalism, the patterns are indeed becoming, as Eliot foretold over sixty years ago, “more complicated.”

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