ATDTDA - grace

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 2007-02-10 at 13:28 -0500, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> SPOILER ALERT -- last page
> 
> 
> 
> TRP uses (and defines) the word "grace," on p.42.  It's also the final word of the novel.  Not sure if there are other references in between.
> 
> P. 42:
> "One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace."  Next paragraph:  "He understood that things were exactly what they were.  It seemed more than he could bear."
> 
> Right after this, he's hired by White City Investigations, after impressing Nate with his ability to observe things (just as they are?).
> 
> A couple of reviewers seemed to take the mention of grace at the end of the book in its religious sense.  The Inconvenience has become sort of a public conveyance, the world in microcosm, and it flies toward grace.  But if grace is understanding that things are exactly what they are, it seems that TRP has something other than the religious connotation in mind.  Things that are exactly what they are don't have any particular grace of god bestowed on them.  They belong more to the preterite than the elect.

Grace can  be made to sound less Christianly religious if we think of it
as "deliverance" and simultaneously replace Grace's opposite--Sin--with
"injustice."

So, Lew, very fleetingly, experiences a feeling that things are not, or
may not always be, what they are or what they seem.  But in the next
moment that feeling of hope (grace) has vanished.

And at the end of the book, the Chum's fly toward the hope that somehow
"good unsought and uncompensated" will come into the world, although
there is as yet no sign of this actually happening.

Against the Day is a book of Hope, Hope as yet unfulfilled.

Anarchism is a hope of deliverance, but to date that deliverance has not
arrived or is any place in the vicinity. 

Not on earth, only in magic and dreams.