“But if the Frontier was gone now, did that mean Lew was about to disconnected, too, from himself?  sent off into exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered into the control of potent operatives who did not wish him well?”

- Thomas Pynchon, “Against the Day”

Well cher bro – that’s as good as anything in 1984.  Back when this novel was set, the turn of 20th Century America, the Frontier days were passing into a bleak unknown.  Pynchon wonders if it’s happening again.  And just think what happened then – mass production, incredible speeds of transportation, the internets…  also Big Brother, Cheeseburgers, Nuclear Weapons.  Are we almost distinct, multiplied perhaps, from our previous selves a hundred years old?  Did Terrance McKenna have a point with his highfaluten Novelty Theory?  Are we all synapses of a mind awakening from infancy, becoming self aware?  And if we could say hello to some great man of the past, like Buffalo Bill, would he think our world utopic, or dystopic?