VLVL "Secret retributions"

[pynchonoid]

This came in the latest issue of SojoMail, published
today by Sojourners magazine, <http://www.sojo.net>. 
It brings to (my) mind Pynchon's use of the Emerson
quote about "divine justice" near the end of
_Vineland_, as well as the "cause and effect" passage
in _Gravity's Rainbow_. And, of course, a link to an
earlier P-list discussion of Tolkien....


Excerpt from a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to his  
son Christopher, 10 April 1944:  

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the  
sum total of human misery all over the world at the
present moment: The millions parted, fretting,  
wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from  
torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If  
anguish were visible, almost the whole of this  
benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark
vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the  
heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly
evil - historically considered. But the historic  
version is, of course, not the only one. All things
and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from
their 'causes' and 'effects'. No man can estimate 
what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. 
All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct
experience, is that evil labors with vast power and
perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the 
soil for unexpected good to sprout in.  

 - from "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,"  
edited by Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin Co.)

Pynchon would appear to offer a bit harsher judgement
in Vineland (p. 369, quoted by Jess from "a jailhouse
copy of _The Vareties of Religious Experience_, by
William James."):

"Secret retributions are always restoring the level,
when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is
impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and
proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set
their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever the
ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and
star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by
the recoil."

Of course there's always the (small, imo) possibility
that Pynchon intends this ironically and is making fun
of old Jess, but it doesn't strike me that way. 



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