The Disquisition (I Think I'm Turning Japanese)

[Keith McMullen]

I am often appalled, and at times embarrassed, at how some P-listers 
relentlessly try to turn Pynchon into a friendly, outgoing, left-wing 
political essayist, instead of seeing him as the reclusive artist that 
he most clearly and undeniably is. This morning I came across a letter 
written by John Keats which, although written almost 200 years ago, 
rings true today. Excuse this interruption of the Quest for the 
Historical Pynchon and the ongoing examination of the Dead Horse 
Scrolls.

http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html

excerpt:

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various 
subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck 
me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in 
Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean 
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in 
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after 
fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine 
isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from 
being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued 
through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a 
great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or 
rather obliterates all consideration."  --John [Keats]