Two Encyclopedias, Fat and Thin Spoiler AtD 1045

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"The number of words in your quote may be deliberate, but then again,
 it may be random, and by hiding that passage (which could easily be 
quoted as a longer or shorter passage) within a larger paragraph, 
Pynchon has certainly made sure that only the true adept will find it."

. . . .ah, yep! What had happened, all those years ago, was stumbling 
across "The Enochian Apocalypse" while reading "Gnosis" magazine.
This was around 1996 in an edition of the magazine dealing with 
Hermeticism. 

"The basic idea behind Hermeticism is that correspondences exist 
between the world of the Divine Intellect and the created world. The 
magician's own imagination is the bridge linking the two."
- Gary Lachman, from The Renaissance of Hermetic Man 

So clearly, to a certain degree, I am "projecting a world". At the same
time, as "Against the Day" makes explicitly clear, Pynchon is quite
familiar---hell, comfortable--- with those sorts of worlds:

". . . .There was a Filipino hop dealer he knew down on lower State
who could gaze into the depths of a toilet bowl the way other scryers 
might a crystal ball or teacup, and learn the damnedst things, most of 
them useless, but now and then so illuminative of secrets a subject 
might think he or she had kept perfectly hidden that there was no way 
this side of the supernatural to explain it. Cops here and in L.A. 
respected Emilio's gifts enough to allow him discounts on the payoffs
required to persue his career in agricultural goods unmolested." (AtD 1045)

or. . . .

"The sun came up a baleful smear in the sky, not 
quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance 
of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, 
so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed 
from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy 
deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a 
word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even 
to be remembered in silence."  

and sorry, got this off of:

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_isola-di-rifiuti_archive.html

so I can't give you a page # though the rest of "Isola di Rifiuti" for
November 29, 2006 has plenty to say about the power of utterance,
the power of invocation and the potentially greater power of silence.
Pynchon's Introduction to Jim Dodge's "Stone Junction" is explicit 
regarding the magical properties of "ritual reluctance", of investing 
words with such power, that they are not to be uttered:

". . . .it is for him to slip along that last borderline, 
into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot 
be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi 
advised us---after "To know, to will, to dare" as 
the last and greatest rules of Magic---we must keep silent."

I guess one of the things I'm trying to say is that Pynchon most likely 
is an adept, if only as a true amature who's keen on old Jacobian texts
and matrices, and that the elements of the occult are in his books for a 
reason. The notion that what is being called down at the estate sale
is the apocalypse strikes me as one of a number of possible readings
to be gleaned from "The Crying of Lot 49". 1966 was a time when
Yoyodyne was working on the delivery system for the apocalypse,
and the end of all things just might have been one of the booby 
prizes to be unearthed from Pierce Inverarity's estate.

"So did the couples arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House 
either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the 
Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. 
Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa 
in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there 
either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy 
America, or there was just America then it seemed the only way she 
could continue, and manage to be at all relevant, was as an alien, 
unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia." (COL49: 150-51)