NPPF Commentary Line 209, P. 163

[Vincent A. Maeder]

Though I did not bring the text with me, the commentary notes that
everything is subject to decay (anyone have the text to assist here?)  The
concept of decay ties nicely into the 2nd law of thermodynamics, entropy,
and Maxwell's Demon (there's a Pynchon connection for you).
V.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Terrance [mailto:lycidas2 at earthlink.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 9:21 AM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: re: NPPF Commentary Line 209, P. 163
> 
> >Line 209 is the first line of the seventh stanza wherein the poet
> >discusses possible escapes from death including resurrection (cf. line
> >238, empty emerald case and the overtones of resurrection).  Lines
> >209-210 read, "What moment in gradual decay/Does resurrection choose?"
> >This brings in all sorts of images and baggage packed with
> >thermodynamics, religious resurrection, and soul survival.  A neat trick
> >with only eight words.
> 
> Wha? Thermodynamics? I guess I missed that neat trick.
> 
> Maud is dead. The poet is not discussing thermodynamics.
> What he is discussing, again, is resurrection, life after death, and the
> state of the soul before, during,  after,  life.
> 
> Why  fly from these spiritual terminals, abandon the religious baggage
> at the carrousel, hop on a connecting flight stapled to a flying and
> dying heat engine?
> 
> Why set all our engines against the possibility of an everlasting life
> over the rainbow and through the looking glass? Till the clatter of the
> engine wake us and we drown?
> 
> But how crazy must a poet be to give the world the lie with his peculiar
> verse?
> 
> My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
> And falls into the basin of the mind
> That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
> For intellect no longer knows
> I, Is from the I, Ought, or I knower from the I Known --
> That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
> Only the dead can be forgiven;
> But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.