Niethammer, Posthistoire

[Terrance]

"But when, finally, advancing doubt made an end of God the
Creator, there was left in being no more than the mechanical
world-system which would never have been so crudely denuded
of spirit but for its previous degradation to the status of
creature." 

               --Karl Jaspers, MAN IN THE MODERN AGE

There is much in Pynchon that echoes, in the trees, in the
woods, in the stones, theophanies not so far from Jaspers,
others, like Berkeley, some American philosophers and poets.
Nature as history, the rings of time in the trees, the river
flowing from north to south, that might Mississippi of
Twain, the Thames of Eliot's youth is also a line, cut deep
in the earth, a passageway carrying the Confidence Men and
all manner of men and their Words.  For Jaspers, history
itself is a book of transcendence, which breaks through the
cracks and fissures of great epochs, with their cipher
texts. Like Berkeley, whose God was present in the woods,
one needs only to walk through the forest to see God
revealed in the iridescent book of nature, Jasper's God is
an inexhaustibly eloquent rhetorician who speaks through an
irreducible multiplicity of existential shapes and forms,
tongues and tropes.