a mystery solved

[TERRY CAESAR]

     My heart flutters, my hand trembles. One of the great minor mysteries of
GR--and what else is this list about if not loving attention to such things?--
is whether or not Pynchon made up Von Braun's words at the outset of the book.
We've discussed the question recently and inconclusively. In a few weeks I'll
give a paper at the Twentieth Century Lit conference in Louisville where I
allow the opinion that Pynchon made up the words. But he didn't! I was wrong.
The proof is before me, in the form of the remarkable volume, The Third Book
of Words to Live By, ed. by William Nichols (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962).

     The book consists of a selection of seventy-eight columns from THis Week
magazine. Same: "On Integrity," by Sammuel Goldwyn, or "'Oh, Those Days of
Childhood!'" by Grandma Moses. The editor ruminates in his intro. on the lost
art of inspiration. Among the inspirers is Werner Von Braun, no less, on "Why
I Belive in Immortality." On p. 120, toward the end, he says exactly what he's
quoted by Pynchon in GR as saying. Interestingly, though, there's a final para-
graph after the first line about nature knowing transformation (mostly blather)
and then a final sentence after the bit about the continuity of our spiritual
existence after death. The final sentence reads thus: "Nothing disappears with-
out a trace."

     Much could be written--much will--on why Pynchon chose to omit this last
sentence. For the moment, I'm still dumbstruck to discover that Pynchon didn't
make up Von Braun's words. I should say that this Words to Live By volume only
comes my way courtesy of Joseph Tabbi's new Postmodern Sublime (Cornell, '95).
Tabbi has an introductory footnote where he mentions Norman Mailer's collection
of NASA papers, access to which were given to him by Robert Lucid (great name!),
Mailer's biographer. NASA evidentally liked to quote from this volume during
the first (July, 1969) moon launch. Mailer underlined the first portion of
Pynchon's quotation in his copy of Words to Live By.

     Still not sure about extinction, but more sure about traces,

                  Terry Caesar