ATDTDA (9): 239/251 Take This Chance, Chums

[Keith]

In this section Pynchon offers two significant passages juxtaposing  
the rhetoric of capitalism/imperialism/visibilty and spirituality/ 
transcendence/invisibility. Alchemy/chemistry is presented elsewhere  
in a similar fashion. Through the perspectives quoted below he is  
presenting phenomenal reality as but a mirror image of something  
greater, something "more real." Implied is that material pursuits are  
the same, less real, inferior reflections, of greater pursuits  
towards transcendence. I am not saying that these perspectives  
represent "Pynchon's perspective," but that these perspectives are  
presented alongside others in ATD and are one major aspect in the  
thread of mirroring and reflections.

Enlightenment is a dodgy proposition. It all depends how much you  
want to risk. Not money so much as personal safety, precious time,  
against a very remote long shot coming in. It happens, of course. Out  
of the dust, the clouds of sweat and breath, the drumming of hooves,  
the animal rises up behind the field, the last you’d’ve expected,  
tall, shining, inevitable, and passes through them all like a beam of  
morning sunlight through the spectral residue of a dream. But it’s  
still a fool’s bet and a mug’s game, and you might not have the will  
or the patience. (239)

It wanted us to know that we, too, are here on a Pilgrimage. [...]  
When all the masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into  
our own duty, our fate. Which is not to penetrate Asia in hopes for a  
profit. Which is not to perish in the deserts of the world without  
reaching our objective. Which is not to rise in the hierarchies of  
power. Not to discover fragments of any True Cross however imagined.  
As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any  
parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church- 
grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of  
what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality  
are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than  
we can imagine - to save us from the blinding terror of having to  
make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day  
of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem. (251)

Slouching towards Bethlehem
W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?