"The Evacuation still proceeds..." GR Part 1 Section 1

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Yes. I think there are lots of scenes and interludes where there are 
echoes of the opening sequence (e.g. Jess's nightmare of "something 
stalking through the city of Smoke" pp. 53 ff, Pointsman's dream of 
"the apparition" p. 137 etc). My theory is that Pynchon wrote one long, 
ominous, stream-of-consciousness-type nightmare and then carved it up, 
reedited the pieces and then farmed them out to other episodes and 
characters.

best

On 25/10/2005 David Meury wrote:

> Later, after the evacuation, "In the Zone" --
> specifically, in the bowels of the Mittelwerke,
> Pynchon echoes the opening dream sequence) --
>
> ". . . it was always easy, in open and lonely places,
> to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are
> the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you
> are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing,
> when there is no more History, no time-traveling
> capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness
> and the absence that fill a great railway shed after
> the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's
> city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light,
> playing the tunes thay always played, but more audible
> now, because everything else has gone away or fallen
> silent
> . . . barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight,
> rise toward the white ceilings . . . they are unique
> to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty.
> Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or
> wraiths of the living.  But here in the Zone
> categories have been blurred badly.  The status of the
> name you miss, love, and search for now has grown
> ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the
> bureaucracy of mass absence--some still live, some
> have died, but many, many have forgotten which they
> are."
>
> * * *
>
> "But the living are wrong to make distinctions that
> are
> too absolute.  Angels (they say) often can't tell
> whether they move among the living or the dead.  The
> eternal torrent hurls all ages through both realms
> forever and drowns out their voices in both." --
> Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy
>
>
> 		
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