ATDTDA (21): Nights out here on the masegni, 580-582

[Monte Davis]

Paul sez:

> As previously he recalled Merle for her, so here does talk of 
> Venetian light recall American light, her childhood and Merle 
> (581), the paragraph drifting away rather than closing ...
> 
> Furthermore, on "all those small, perfect towns ..."

This is an example of what I had in mind last February in ATDTDA (3) when I
wrote:
===

If I could keep only four pages of AtD, it would be these [69-72]. Please:
take a few minutes to read it over, from "After the closing..." to "...palm
out for a tip." 

Please remember it, because a hundred things about Dally will hinge back on
it. This is how a genius tells us all about a character without telling us
he's telling us...

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0702&msg=115769

===

There are scores of such examples in New York, in Venice, everywhere: you
can hardly find a  combination of Dally and city, Dally and landscape, Dally
and expectations for her life, that isn't rooted (I'll argue consciously,
deliberately set up) in that passage of childhood exile from the White City.


In 1990-91, when I'd been in NYC apartments and a loft for 30 years, my then
wife and I went house-hunting. I couldn't have told you why, after looking
at dozens of suburban houses, I fell in love with the one we bought. Only
after living in it for a few years did I realize one day that the house's
position centered on the crossbar of a 'T' of streets, and the pipe-rail
fence separating its shallow front yard from the sidewalk, were all but
identical to the position and the fence of a house in Massachusetts -- the
last house my family had lived in before moving into NYC in 1960.

The moment I made the connection, I knew that all my conscious evaluations
of the house -- layout, condition, schools, property taxes, all that
checklist stuff -- had been rationalization for "yep, this is home."

Pynchon's teacher Nabokov is eloquent in _Speak, Memory_ about the power of
these "random," usually unrecognized sensory echoes, and argues _passim_
that it exceeds the importance of those Extra Special Memories that so
obsessed the Viennese doctor.