GRGR(8): Nuclear light

[stencil at bcn.net]

...tents whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike,
through the cross-hatched walls,... [Bantam, 149:39-41]

Among the bits of virtu that have survived the Atomic Age are the
pictures that Harold Edgerton made of the behavior of structures in
the proximity of the fireball.  The images of painted walls erupting
into smoky flame, then snuffed out, then whirled away into
nothingness, inspired strong sequences in T2 and in the soapy _The Day
After_.  In the present text, though, one is minded most of one still,
a grainy snippet much blown up from a grander landscape, that shows
the shack that sheltered the device, in that fraction of a millisecond
between ignition and epiphany.  Balanced for sunlight, the film shows
the windowless building glowing against the stopped-down blackness of
the sky, the light streaming throught the tarpaper and plywood
silhouetting the studs and doorframe.  Pynchon may have been thinking
of the cytological 'nuclear' - and that works, too, obviously -  but
the notion that he might have seen that picture is ...warming.