GRGR Slothrop & Sloth

[rj]

Doug:
> 
> Reading through TRP's NY Times essay on Sloth again, a good touchstone to
> remember that we don't have to remain completely in the dark about Mr P's
> own thoughts and beliefs.  These closing paragraphs of that 1993 essay
> might be useful to consider as we read GR and ponder Sloth-rop's
> adventures, as they seem to disclose something of what TRP thinks about God
> and religion and time and technology:
> 
> "Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious
> concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away
> from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life
> really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a
> beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal.
> The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of
> God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.
> 
> "Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
> increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
> despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
> virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
> fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
> days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
> of the Acedia Squad. "

I can see that it is a meditation on the origin, history and possible
future of 'sloth' as a response to dominant ideologies, but I don't
think Pynchon reveals anything of his personal "beliefs", about God or
religion or time or technology, not in these two paragraphs at least.
Or, if he does, it's in the identification of "God's good intentions"
back in the Middle Ages with "technology's good intentions" now, or in
the near future. The last sentence is irony for irony's sake, isn't it,
one of those masturbation-inducing yoyos Doug despises so?

best