"walking" or "waking"

[Gary L. Thompson]

One small addition to what you may have by now. I don't think there's any 
textual problem here.

I think your friend wrote (read?) "walking" because it's the expected 
word in that context. Pynchon occasionally substitutes another word for 
the one we expect, as here.

The other perspective I have on this is that he's read around in 19th-c. 
American literature, and may be echoing _Walden_ here. (Melville comes in 
with the mention of "isolate," here as in _49_ a look back to Ishmael and 
the others on Ahab's ship of fools.) Thoreau has that bit early on, in 
"Where I Lived and What I Lived For" in which he's talking about waking 
as not only the return of consciousness, but real and significant 
perception: 

"Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is 
the effort to throw off sleep.  . . . To be awake is to be alive. . . . 
[next paragraph] We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not 
by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which 
does not forsake us in our soundest sleep."

And in the next paragraph we get to the _deliberate_ part:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only 
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to 
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

It's textbook stuff now, so I won't go further with this part, or bring in 
the other comments about dawn and Thoreau's resonant (and somewhat 
pretentious) account of his extended camping out. But he makes a lot of 
the notion of waking to the inner significance of things, by force of 
will (i.e., deliberately), and this seems not inappropriate to the 
passage from _GR_.


On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, Morty Schiff wrote:

>                    WAKING DELIBERATELY -- WITH A STRIDE
>                    
>         But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be 
>         reminded how it is, after all, really play -- and be unable 
>         then to continue in the same spirit... Nor need it be 
>         anything sudden, spectacular -- it may come in gentle -- and 
>         regardless of the score, the number of watchers, their 
>         collective wish, penalties they or the Leagues may impose, 
>         the player will, _waking_ deliberately, perhaps with Katje's 
>         own tough, young isolate's shrug and stride, say "fuck 
>         it," and quit the game, quit it cold... 
>       

Gary Thompson
Saginaw Valley SU