take me to the river

[Terrance]

Orwell was an atheist, but he identified what he said was the major
problem of the 20th century: the tragedy of finitude following upon the
decline of belief in personal immortality. _1984_ is a good book for
Pynchon to write about for lots of reasons, but most of all  because
it's a book about Death. O'Brian comes to terms with Death by denying
that individual life has value. Individual Death has no value because
individual life has none.  Only the collective and Big Brother matter,
and they are immortal. That Pynchon mentions fundamentalism only
briefly,  and asserts (incorrectly, this mistake seems to me but one
example of his misreading of _1984_ as some sort of prophetic text) that
Orwell didn't foresee the role religion would have in the future, is
very surprising.  That is, unless P is not talking about christian
fundamentalism. No one, surely not Thomas Pynchon, can fail to see how
extensively Orwell has plundered the doctrines of the christian
religions to expose the terror, the horror, the iniquities of what
Voegelin called the new political and scientific religions. The
parallels and contrasts are what the give the book its shock. The
language Orwell uses, specifically the language that describes
Goldstein, , like the language Melville uses to describe Ahab or the
language P uses to describe Blicero, comes not from Left politics, but
from religion, more specifically demonology. 

What Winston fears most is being taken out of the river of christian
history. Baptized in the name of death. pretty fundamentalist if you ask
me.