...For The Time Being

This phrase. "For the time being."

It's all over literature. I first noticed it from the book A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki a couple years ago. Ever since, I think I've come across this phrase in nearly every book I've read. I thought this was just a coincidence at first. But it's almost like the real version of Stranger Than Fiction's "little did he know." As Hoffman's character wrote papers and taught a class on "little did he know," so too will I conquest to create a tundra-like database of "for the time being." There's so much I've lost. But I might as well start now, if not never.

Martin Amis - The Information

"Her mother was still around for the time being, fat and falling apart and still mountainously pretty somehow, in a bed somewhere."

So. Much like my Literary Chicago project, I'm going to try to keep track of this phrase being used and how authors use it. Do they actually reference what their 'for the time being' foreshadows? Or is it a throw away? A red herring?

Speaking of that other project, this novel is ripe with Chicago references. For a taste:

"He reread:

To recap: The itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

Denver. Why Denver?"

Amis extends on length about Chicago when his characters arrive. There's some real gems here.

"Chicago was the only city that really frightened him...The severity of its naked steel frightened him. Chicago, he knew, was the cradle, or the ancient assembly point, of the American political machine. What goes around comes around. I'm okay: you're okay. We don't take nobody nobody sent. Chicago, he knew, was the eight biggest city on earth. Cities are machines. No other city he had ever been to said to you, as Chicago said to you, This is a machine. I am a machine."

"There was a traffic jam all the way in from the airport, and dark rain. The mist was as thick as clouds and the clouds were as thick as smoke and the smoke was as thick as chalk. Chilling Chicago awaited them in its vapors and gray medium, deeply massed and square-shouldered on the vague horizon."

There is then a passage about how an author's radio interview segment gets bumped for news about the Cubs. Yeah, I thought this was a work of fiction too. But have you seen the news lately? And then, back to the airport.

"There was a traffic jam all the way to the airport, and dark rain. The five lanes going out of the city were all blocked and the five lanes coming into the city were all blocked. On the central divide, the empty trains, rigidly balanced, cruised by. You could sense the shape and mass of blackened smokestacks. You could see lights, and the reflections of lights, car lights, murkily glistening - the filthy jewelry of the Kennedy Expressway."