wicks and decadence

[public domain]

NB that Wicks has a collection of "Undeliver'd"
  sermons (511), as well as   his "Spiritual Day-Book"
  (275, 440, 481), his "Unpublished Sermons" (95),  
and
  the work entitled "Christ and History" (349), but
that
  they all seem to   contain exactly the same muddled
  mix of petulance, polemic and pompousness.

"In their Decadency these Virginians practice an
elaborate Folly of Courtly Love, unmodified since the
Dark Ages, so relentlessly that at length they cannot
distinguish Fancy from the substantial World, and
their Folly absorbs them into itself…."

This example from the spiritual daybook is quite
different from the one on the planets. While both are
a bit muddled and obviously fragmented, this one seems
to be better for support for the reading of young
Wicks as a pompous ass. The mention of Decadence and
Courtly Love remind of how we can never be sure when
Stencil's narrative has been taken over by one of the
more ironic narrators in the novel V. And when Knights
are no longer chivalrous in Pynchon's novels, like
Gravity's Rainbow, where they are mostly, in their
decadency, mad scientists and corrupt capitalists, no
good can come from the dangerous exploration in time
and space for the plastic Grail. Maybe only Murphy's
Law will save us from such folly. And surely  only He
or She who holds the all the strings, pulleys,
switches and springs of gravity  may say. 

PD & B 

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