A digression...

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>There's every
>possibility that Pynchon came up with 'toil and blood' independently.
>Alternatively, there's the possibility that both Dylan and Pynchon took
>the phrase from the same source, which would constitute another little
>Pynchon-Dylan connection.

Yeah, you're right.
In fact, my first guess was that both Dylan and Pynchon got the phrase from 
the bible. Both writers can certainly wax biblical once in a while, so I was 
pretty sure that The Good Book was their common source. I'm no bible scholar 
(to put it mildly), but Amazon's excellent search feature revealed that this 
biblical sounding phrase does not in fact occur in the bible. A-and it 
doesn't occur in Shakespeare either (the second obvious guess).
I guess we'll have to wait for the authorized biography ("Pynchon - A Life 
in Letters") to discover the exact nature of the Pynchon-Dylan connection.

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