Ticking off the minutes before Stephen Hawking unveils the Corpus Clock today in Cambridge, one is struck by the pundits' failure to connect this marvel with Tom Robbins's clockworks in his 1976 novel, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." Oh, sure, Stephen Hawking is a brilliant scientific mind, but of equal brilliance is beloved and esteemed author Tom Robbins. His literary and philosophical brilliance is of another kind entirely. Both masters shine dazzling light onto the masses. If this were a just world, the two would share the unveiling equally--TR on the left, SH on the right.
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Take now the clockworks… The clockworks, being genuine and not much to look at, don’t generate the drama of an Earth-tilt or a flying saucer, nor do they seem to offer any immediate panacea for humanity’s fifty-seven varieties of heartburn. But suppose that you’re one of those persons who feels trapped, to some degree, trapped matrimonially, occupationally, educationally or geographically, or trapped in something larger than all those; trapped in a system, or what you might describe as an “increasingly deadening technocracy” or a “theater of paranoia and desperation” or something like that. Now, if you are one of those persons… wouldn’t the very knowledge that there are clockworks ticking away behind the wallpaper of civilization, unbeknownst to leaders, organizers and managers (the President included), wouldn’t that knowledge, suggesting as it does the possibility of unimaginable alternatives, wouldn’t that knowledge be a bubble bath for your heart?”
~Tom Robbins, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”
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