Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) blends fact and fable. At the postmodern tome’s tail end, a fictional, anthropomorphic lightbulb named “Byron” wages war against the Phoebus Cartel: a nonfictional conglomerate of corporations—General Electric, Philips, Tokyo Electric, Osram, Siemens, and Tungsram—that monopolized the global lightbulb industry from 1925 to 1939.

On a hot spring day in Locust Valley, Long Island, the artist Ray Johnson sent out a missive to a broad swath of his New York Correspondence School. The childish cursive spelled out in looping script: “Richard Lippold died, May 31, 1974.”

God shares no attribute with the created. Obsolescence is an attribute of the created. God willed the obsolescence of the emerging artist by creating this world in which nothing escapes expiration.