Ballooning with Gabriel

[Mark Kohut]

Wonderful, of course. 
 
And the quoted paragraph from Marquez before the one below, containing perhaps more richness in "the giant eyeball" image [of god; or NOT God just a man-made eyeball?]  early in AtD?...and the concept of 'siege'?-- also a major theme of AtD. And ruins, of course. 
 
"From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor."

And isn't the word "heartsease", with all of its under and overtones, a wonderful Pynchon-like choice?. (great writers contain multitudes):
heartsease
     n 1: a common and long cultivated European herb from which most
          common garden pansies are derived [syn: wild pansy, Johnny-jump-up,
           love-in-idleness, pink of my John, Viola tricolor]
     2: violet of Pacific coast of North America having white petals
        tinged with yellow and deep violet [syn: two-eyed violet,
         Viola ocellata]
     3: common Old World viola with creamy often violet-tinged
        flowers [syn: field pansy, Viola arvensis]
     4: the absence of mental stress or anxiety [syn: peace, peacefulness,
         peace of mind, repose, serenity, ataraxis]
 



----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 9:33:13 AM
Subject: Ballooning with Gabriel


I've always said that TRP hyper-exemplifies Henry James' "Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost." 
I just tripped over this, from his 1988 review of _Love in the Time of Cholera_, which I read at the time but hadn't recalled in a decade. Well, d'oh! in the context of AtD, if it were any more self-recognizing and self-descriptive it would disappear up its own ass:
"…the Garcímárquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:
… 
'They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.' "


http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_cholera.html


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