Dont you care? Michael Wood

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

A very interseting review of Richard Powers's "The Echo Maker",
with a little Pynchon on the side:

At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, 
Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on 
their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of the Good 
resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good’. A voice, 
apparently coming from nowhere, says: ‘You wonder? That’s all? 
What about “care”? Don’t you care?’ The surveyors explain to the 
voice that surveying is what they do. They have clients, they meet 
their clients’ requests. Just doing their job. There aren’t too many 
significant resemblances between Pynchon and Richard Powers
 – Powers’s imagination is deeply invested in the local and in 
Pynchon the local is always about to become something else – 
but the passage about the Line and the Good finds an interesting 
and no doubt unintended commentary in The Echo Maker. . . .

. . . .What’s really strange, of course, is that care should come to seem 
so strange, or should drop so easily out of the picture. Isn’t caring what 
humans do, as distinct from machines? Perhaps it’s what they don’t do. 
The question acquires a particular edge in this context because the 
voice interrupting Mason and Dixon’s conversation is that of an 
automaton, Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. The machine is surprised 
at the lack of moral concern among humans.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n04/wood01_.html