The glamorous prospect of annihilation ...

[Dave Monroe]

"The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and
purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite.  But somehow
those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking
out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a
certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to
prove fatal.  One by one the glamorous prospect of
annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one
left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like
a ship's master, had been the last to go." (Lot 49,
Ch. 6, p. 155)

"Glamorous," by the way ...

Main Entry: glam·our 
Variant(s): or glam·or  /'gla-m&r/
Function: noun
Etymology: Scots glamour, alteration of English
grammar; from the popular association of erudition
with occult practices
Date: 1715
1 : a magic spell <the girls appeared to be under a
glamour -- Llewelyn Powys>
2 : an exciting and often illusory and romantic
attractiveness; especially : alluring or fascinating
personal attraction -- often used attributively       
   <glamour stock> <glamour boy> <glamour girl>

But note, "a certain sick and fascinated horror," cf.
Hannah Arendt's "fascination of the abomination"
(Eichmann in Jerusalem)?  Or, anachronistically,
Heaven's Gate?  But cf. as well, of course, not only
...

"... his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic,
death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a
little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that
had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few years
ahead of them."  (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 65)

... but also the albino alligator of V., the Herero of
that "Letter to Thomas F. Hirsch," The Empty Ones of
Gravity's Rainbow ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=66&sort=date

"Death-wishful," indeed.  Pynchon saying a little
something about our own "preapocalypticism" ...

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