AD

[rich]

that is a very interesting passage

it would appear to those who study history that it's easy to add up the
"subtle symptoms"--nationalism, technology, colonialism, capital flow, and
conclude with an easy equal sign world war and devastation.

But then that diagnosis, that V-irus, as we know, was never eradicated.
fascism was only the inevitable end-point, pointing up the fears, hatreds,
and petty lusts of average intellects.

the upshot for us, the reader, the author, the historian, is profound
melancholy, all we can do is gently touching up old memories (flesh photos)
to enhance the magical, now long gone.

Post GR, Vineland and M&D are both novels that thematically look back in
sadness (and some anger) on younger days. Pynchon thankfully, pbly to the
regret of the revolutionaries, gives us a bit of sweet with our broccoli,
homer simpsons who won't change the world, or build cities, but are
endearingly human in an inhuman environment.

rich
On 8/10/06, Dustin Iler <osirx277 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Sidney Stencil on the period in which AD is said to be set . . .
>
>
> " 'Which way does it go? As a youth I believed in social progress because
> I
> saw chances for personal progress of my own. Today, at age sixty, having
> gone as far as I'm about to, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and
> if
> you're right, for my society as well. But then: suppose Sidney Stencil has
> remained constant after all--suppose instead sometime between 1859 and
> 1919,
> the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to
> diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle-- blending in with the
> events
> of history, no different one by one but altogether--fatal. This is how the
> public, you know, see the late war. As a new and rare disease which has
> now
> been curred (sic) and conquered for ever.' "
>
> V. (Perrenial Classics) pg. 498
>
>
> Against the Day, being set in this period and leading up to that
> cataclysmic
> event, promises to be the diagnosis.
>
> I can't help but imagine Pycnhon rereading this passage and seeing himself
> as Sidney Stencil.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> (And apologies if this has already been brought up)
> >
>
>
>
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