VV (3) - Stencil's Love

[Don Corathers]

David Morris wrote:

By choosing a motive for action an object which does not move him, a task in 
which he invests no feeling and a grail he hopes to never find he has freed 
himself from everything but himself.  His isolation is complete, unless some 
feeling manages to break through.  Stencil has succeeded in making himself 
his own automaton.

(snip)

Interesting that in the next paragraph after the ones you quote, "the impasse had become acute." That seems to be the closest thing Stencil can achieve to comfortable equilibrium: some set of circumstances that are outside of his control blocking the hunt for a while. Still he is not able to sustain that for very long. "It was dithering, it was a stagnant period and Stencil knew it." He is compelled to be active, but activity, moving him closer to his objective, will eventually extinguish itself, and then he's really fucked.

Please excuse me, David, for restating your restatement of Mr. Pynchon's exposition of Stencil's dilemma. This stuff seems to me to be thematically close to the Big Root, and now that I've run it through my own fingers and keyboard I've got a better sense of it.

Don