Subject: (urth) PEACE EZ Timeline

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 15:10:23 +0000

Speaking of timelines for PEACE, here is my version. It is what mantis calls
the "EZ" timeline, because it is based on accepting at face value the date
of 1938 for the coldhouse prank, and that Den was two years out of college,
as claimed. Den should be 24 then (not 23), because his birthday was in May
and the prank occurred in summer. I have included a few historical dates,
just for background. Page numbers are for the Berkley paperback.

The timeline is not as concise, in places, as I would like it to be because,
well, you know why; Wolfe doesn't make things easy! Few dates are given,
time periods tend to be expressed in round numbers, and you seldom know what
year you're counting from. It's easier to pick apart someone else's
timeline--to point out that "this fact" makes "that date" wrong--than to
defend your own, but I can make my case for any given date, if anyone is
interested. The two five-year wimp-out spans are the result of ambiguous,
(seemingly) conflicting details. It does not cover all of the convolutions
resulting from Den's imaginary visit(s) to Dr. Van Ness, nor mantis's
"Liberty" magazine clue.

****************************************
1895 Den's mother born. (based on p.17 "My mother would have been
twenty-five, I six. It was the year after Bobby Black was hurt.")

1914 May, Den born. W.W.I begins in Europe.

1918 End of W.W.I.

1919 May, Den, age 5, pushed Bobby Black down the stairs; fake deerskin
treaty painted.

1920 Begin Prohibition. December, Den received scout knife.

1923 Bobby Black dies.
     Den's parents go to Europe, Den goes to live with Aunt Olivia.
     July, Chinese-egg affair. Vi claims to be 26 (p.97), but may be
fudging; I agree with mantis that she is closer to 30.
     August 3, Macafee's 41st birthday party (p.171), when Vi meets Julius
Smart and they all tell stories. Den says that Smart was, at that time, "at
least five years younger than my aunt" (p.149). Smart's adventure with Mr.
Tilly took place the summer after he graduated college, so he was about 24
then. Charlie Turner's mother, Jan, (in one of the few references to larger
world events in the text) who was herself not "much more than twenty"
(p.138), mentioned that one of her brothers had been killed in France,
obviously in the Great War (p.143). Den was nine at the time of this party.
He said he started to tell Smart's story to Bill Batton "thirty-five or
forty years" later (p.135). Forty years later would have been when he was 49
and president of the company, about 1963.

1924 or 1925 Vi marries J. Smart, Den's parents still overseas.

1928 L. Gold leaves Breslau. (p.197)

1929 circa, L. Gold meets Sally. (p.214) [1]

1929 October, Stock Market crash, begin Depression.

1929-1934 circa, Olivia dies. [1]

1933 End Prohibition.

1938(summer) Coldhouse prank , Den age 24. (p.230)

1939-1945 W.W.II.

1950-1953 Korean War.

1954-1959 Time frame for the Lois/Gold affair. Den age 40-45. Sherry Gold is
16. Lois is close to 35.

1963 circa, Den becomes president of the company at about 49. Crazy Pete on
island.

1974-1975 Den's death; PEACE published.

[1] There is a problem here. Two events are linked in that they both
occurred 25 years before the time of the Lois/Gold affair--Vi's death and
Gold meeting Sally--yet other factors seem to separate these two events by
several years.

Roy

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 15:52:31 +0000

Yay, the timeline!!

1918 after May, Den, age 4 visits Dr. Black ("Liberty" magazine = anachronism)

>Gold meeting Sally--yet other factors seem to separate these two events by

There is a bear of a problem, which might be wiggled through (but it sure
ain't EZ), in the following cluster:

Astral visit to Dr. V as corpulant president (in first year of presidency);
which is same year as Crazy Pete on his island (circa 1964); and seeing 16
year old Sherry in Dr. V's waiting room (where Sherry is supposed to be 16
about ten years earlier).

How to have Pete in the 60s and Sherry in the 50s?

To show my enthusiasm for Roy's timeline: we had long suspected that the
Dr. V astral visit was a mix of at least two realtime visits (which seemed
the case when the nurse comes in and tells Den he ought to be
undressed--this seems like a "bad splice"); if this is true, then I found a
nearly invisible seam of splicing when Den first goes in, before he sees
the doctor.

1) Fat new president Den (rich man at 50) enters waiting room, sees
Margaret Lorn (uh, that's Mrs. Price to you, bub <g>), Sherry Gold, Ted
Singer (odd, but we have some stuff on him), and Abel Green (huh?).

2) Margaret is reading "Life" magazine, but then she puts it down and goes
in to see the doctor, never seen in a later timeframe. (This putting down
of "Life" and exiting, added to the damp impressions left by her hands,
make me suspect that she is terminally ill and will die before Den's next
yearly physical.  IF that is true, then Den will retreat from the scene to
avoid the pain . . . )

3) Nurse calls for Mrs. Price, and "Sherry, who is sixteen now" tells her
that Margaret already went in.  SPLICE!  (See, the discontinuity of the
nurse's behavior is the first hint, but Sherry is sixteen =now=, [she was
in her twenties, say, a sentence before] that's the smoking gun.)

4) Doctor examines underweight (i.e., poor man at 40) Den.

This, then, is a way Den can go into the doctor's office in the 60s but
actually only see the doctor in the 50s!

===
Liberty: the anachronistic magazine in Doctor B's office; the coin,
shipwreck plunder, found by Den on that fateful picnic with Margaret . . .

Life: the magazines in Doctor V's office . . .

Just add "the pursuit of happiness" and by gum, you've got that ringing
phrase from the Declaration of Independence: "Life, Liberty, and the Pusuit
of Happiness"!
===
Hey, remember that 71 year old potato farmer?  I've secretly wondered if he
is Mr. Price.  You know, he lives out toward Milton, his grown sons (three
or more?) don't want the farm, sounds like he's a widower . . .

=mantis=

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 14:04:09 +0000

> actually only see the doctor in the 50s!

I think we'd need at least one more splice, maybe two.  On the page
after Weer is underweight, we have this dialogue:

   "There's not a man in my plant I'd talk to the way you talk to every
patient you've got."
   "But I can't fire my patients, Mr. Weer."

The clear implication is that Weer is president at this point; at any
rate, he's not the poor 40-year-old.  Then a couple pages later we have
the dialogue putting Weer's age as in the early 40s.  I don't know if we
can push Weer's presidency back that far; if not, another splice.

While looking this up, I noticed another sentence: "There is (as a
matter of fact) a whole pile of _Lifes_ before me, and I play the old
game of trying to arrange them chronologically without looking at the
dates, and lose." (3)  If that isn't Wolfe going nyah-nyah-nyah to his
readers, I don't know what is.  (And I won't even go into the
implications of reincarnation in the first half of the sentence!)

--Adam

---

From: Alex David Groce <alex_groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 14:28:16 +0000

> implications of reincarnation in the first half of the sentence!)

These two quotes strengthen Dan'l's hypothesis about the Doctors being
guides in the afterlife as well.  A pile of lives in the waiting room,
indeed.  Hmmm...  Which brings in a point: perhaps there's something
less solipsistic about this than we think.  At various times it seems
that Den's afterlife and old age are appearing as anachronisms in his
memories of earlier times, in his interactions with other characters.
What if, since our time-frame implies that ALL of the residents of
Cassionville are long dead, these others are not simply recreations of
the past, or spirits called from the vasty deep, but others
experiencing the same kind of afterlife as Den?  I think WEER sees
them to some extent as simply memories, ghosts, or shadows, but what
if that is a reflection of his isolation rather than the actual state
of things?  This fits nicely with the lich's implication that Den and
Gold are the spirits; perhaps to Miss Birkhead, Den is simply a
character in her TAT-guided "purgatory."  This sharing of stories
makes more sense thematically than to have the characters simply be
dredged up by Den's dead soul--even Den states openly that this is not
his story.  He calls Julian Smart, of all people, the central
character.

--
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce