 There are also two uses of the phrase "against the day" in Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon", and, anecdotally, three uses in William Gaddis's "J R".One may assume that Pynchon has read his Walter Benjamin, who in his famous "Theses on the Concept of History" XV quotes a satirical ditty composed on the occasion of the July Revolution of 1830, when it was reported that several clock towers across Paris had been fired on