Home Fires questions

Stephen Hoy · 23 Oct 2011, 15:25 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: stephenhoy at yahoo.com (Stephen Hoy)
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:25:25 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Home Fires questions
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On Wednesday, October 19, 2011 3:11 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Stephen Hoy <stephenhoy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> What if a year is actually ten hundred-days? Is there anything in Home Fires
>> that might contradict this metrification?

>No, but I believe that if they were going to call a thousand days a
>"year," they would've called a hundred days a "month;" contrariwise,
>if they were going to call a hundred days a "hundred-day," they would
>have come up with an appropriate name for a thousand-day. I could, of
>course, be wrong, but I don't think Wolfe would throw in such an
>inconsistency without at least a hint.

I agree, an author should give a hint of any change in the definition of a year. The question is whether "hundred-day" is a hint.
As Dan'l points out, we only have a "hundred-day" in Home Fires. Where are "ten-day" and "thousand-day"? There's no mention of month but we do find other non-metric time terms like hour, week, and year. However, trying to stretch a week to ten days won't work because Wolfe eliminates the possibility. In Reflection 17 Looking Over a Rail, Skip calculates the wages of the crew: <<What is it the seamen get? The captain told me. Seventy noras a week, so one thousand per hundred-day.>> ?Ten noras a day, confirming seven days in a week, and an ugly 14.3 weeks per hundred day.
A search for year = thousand-day (or any other value that appeals) also comes up empty. There's no indication that the number of days in a year has changed. Even time-of-day seems unchanged after a careful re-reading. We fail in any search for a philometric calendar with units of 1, 10, 100, 1000. So why does Wolfe refer so frequently to a "hundred-day"?

Either I'm missing something as a reader, or "hundred-day" is mere window dressing--a sort of fictional condiment like all the food scenes in An Evil Guest.
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