Time

The key word in Point Omega, which resurfaces every few pages, is time. Time is running out; time is slowing down; time is speeding up. Time is always ticking away in the background, either as a clock with endless battery life or a bomb with an unknown fuse. Even Elster acknowledges that "we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic" (17).

To avoid such smears of panic, Elster trades the "bulk and swagger" of the Pentagon for the silent oblivion of the desert, "for space and time" to think without the distractions of society (19). He claims, "Time slows down when I'm here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape...