"spiculed with kindness"

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

In that wonderful collection of essays, Mindful Pleasures,
David Leverenz writes:

Yet there are several kinds of "sense" that do emerge from
Gravity's Rainbow, at the "stone resonance, where there is
not good or evil" (720). Almost all of these senses have to
do with the perverted manipulation of natural love. As the
Puritans knew and Pynchon continually reminds us (though
none of us really thinks it's true), "kindness is a sturdy
enough ship for these oceans" (21) One of the early
Separatists, John Robinson, who in fact never ventured
across, once wrote that "love rather descends, than ascends;
as streams of water do." He was talking of the love of
parents for children, but in Pynchon's world that kind of
"descent" is what is most missing from his betrayed,
abandoned, oven-prone lives. 
	In Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon's sense of descent, of loss
and separation and victimization, precludes jaunty
solutions. Animate ambiguities are all he gives us, as a
brief stay against collusion; a hope for simple human
gestures, love without aggression, demand, or use. So Nora
Dodson-Truck pulls Carroll Eventyr inside her five- pointed
star, with "an instinctive, a motherly way, her way with
anyone she loved" (145). So another lost one feels:

He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his
skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but
their safety, and that he'll always manage to describe as
something else--"concern," you know, "fondness...." (35)

"He" is Pirate Prentice, man of a thousand empathies, but he
could be anybody. That love could be anybody too: simple,
sheltering, protective. For Pynchon, no
language--"'concern'" you know, 'fondness'"--can convey it
without distortion.
	This "ache in the skin" is what is most powerful, and most
limiting, about Pynchon's work. It mocks any sense of
structure, and any but the most momentary commitments. But
it also makes us feel our own descent, alone, imprisoned in
our perceptiveness. As if we were his burned-out Honigstiger
tank, Pynchon points us too the gray waste, spiculed with
kindness.