GR 'Streets' (death and/or afterlife)

[Terrance]

pynchonoid wrote:
> 
> Every reader gets the Pynchon she wants and needs; it
> is like reading the Bible.

The study of literature belongs to the Humanities, and the Humanities,
as their name indicates, can take only the human view of the superhuman.
Culture interposes, between the ordinary and the religious life, a total
vision of possibilities, and insists on its totality--for whatever is
excluded from culture by religion or state will get its revenge somehow.
Thus culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy
intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the
object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of
approach to that object. Just as no argument in favor od a religious or
political doctrine is of any value unless it is an intellectually honest
argument, and so guarantees the autonomy of logic, so no religious or
political myth id either valuable or valid unless it assumes the
autonomy of culture, which may be defined as the total body of
imaginative hypothesis in a society and its tradition. To defend the
autonomy of culture in this sense, it seems to me, is the task of the
intellectual in our postmodern world. If this true, an intellectual
should defend its subordination  to a total synthesis & control by any
SYSTEM, be it political or religious. 

GR is not like the Bible at all. Reading it is not at all like reading
the Bible. It is obviously not the sacred text of the one of the great
religions. 

PS How's that for self-indulgent blather?