Not for nothing but....

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 18:53, Terrance wrote:
> 
> > The irony here is that wrangling over the meaning of the noun
> > "nothingness" on a single page in a huge and complex novel in an absurd
> > manner has prevented a discussion of  "nothingness", Existentialism,
> > Atheism, so on ... as a driving force, theme,  or idea in the novel or
> > in Pynchon's novels.
> 
> I thought M. Chevalier was going to get back to us with his
> investigation of Existentialism in V.

I'll have to dig into my Pynchon file but I'm sure I can come up with at
least a dozen essays (two full length texts) on Existentialism and
Pynchon. 


> 
> Being and Nothingness
> 
> By the way, everyone was an Existentialist back in the fifties. Don't
> remember anyone actually reading the book however. Perhaps a translation
> was not yet available.
> 
> P.

I don't think too many people read Henry Adams back in the Fifties
either. Did they? 

"He admitted force as a form of right; he admitted even
temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would at that
moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as every
one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan
land." 

This quotation gives the flavor of the book. We travel through the
nineteenth century with a guide who is a good deal less detached than he
claims, who is almost at times romantic, almost at times passionate. It
is a unique fusion of history and memoir. We see the century growing
more diverse and chaotic until it becomes terrifying, but always in the
foreground, shrugging, gesticulating, chuckling, at times scolding, is
the neat, bustling figure of our impatient but illuminating observer. He
can stretch his imagination to any limit, but not his tolerance or his
personality. He ends where he began, an aristocrat, a gentleman, a bit
of a  voyeur. The fixed referent of Henry Adams holds the book together
even more than the constant pairing off of unity with multiplicity. At
times it almost seems as if Adams himself, cool, rational, skeptical,
were the one, and observed mankind, moving at a giddy rate of
acceleration toward nothingness, the many. 

Louis Auchincloss 

PS after S~Z's example I decided to call my Father too (He's a retired
Jesuit priest). He laughed and said, "I guess it's hard playing golf up
there in the snow. OK, kiss your wife and have a happy Easter."