AtDTDA 20 Butterfly 566/567

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          David Morris:
          Could be his thinking, and he does bring it up frequently.  
          Who knows? It's an attractive model, which makes it at 
          least as seductive as the Heaven/Hell models.  But its 
          attraction is what makes it so suspect, another alluring 
          fairy-tale.

It seems that Post-Vineland Pynchon is more hopeful. Some take the end of 
Vineland as a very mixed blessing, what with Prairie nearly being hoisted 
away by the evil Brock Vond, but that did have a made-for-T.V. Movie ending 
to it, didn't it? By the end Desmond does come home, all seems safe at harbor. 
One potential meaning of the name Desmond comes from Esmond, Old English for 
protective grace. 

There is the hope in the ending of Mason & Dixon---

          "The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope."
          "The Fish jump into you Arms. The indians know Magick."
          "We'll go there. We'll live there."
          "We'll fish there. And you too."         

. . . .from where we're reading, all we see are irreversible processes. But 
that's not where Doc and William are standing. So for them, at least, there's 
hope. The ending of Against the Day, where the Chums fly towards grace, 
is a storybook ending, but the Chums, after all, are storybook characters.

But as for pages 1079-1083, where it all goes into a fugue state,

[as the Firesign Theater put it so well, so long ago]: 

"In the Next World, You're on Your Own."

He is saying that, somehow, somewhere, there is a heaven for Anarchists.