AtdTDA: [38] Station Break

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         MB:
         "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens"
          - Talking Heads
         Heaven is the grace we are flying towards?

Something that Pynchon does, very much on the order of a tic, is enabling
words to do their Tree of Diana thing, bifurcate, bi-locate, spread and grow 
in possible meanings. In part from a poetic impulse, in part out of pure 
logorrhea. Words like "Traverse" get attached to all possible dictionary 
definitions, in law and surveying, math and colonial exploration.

Looking up the word "Grace" by traversing the web leads straight to
the W. R. Grace Co.:

            Grace is a premier specialty chemicals and materials 
            company noted for experienced people, global reach 
            and strong customer relationships.

http://www.grace.com/About/History.aspx?timeframe=1900

Then there's the second Google listing: "Divine Grace"

          Divine grace
          From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
            (Redirected from Divine Grace)

          This article or section contains weasel words, vague 
          phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable 
          information. Such statements should be clarified or removed.

          This article does not cite any references or sources.
          Please help improve this article by adding citations 
          to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be 
          challenged and removed. (June 2007)

          The examples and perspective in this article or section 
          may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.
          Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the 
          talk page.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Grace

The article concerns itself with a concept of Divine Grace exclusively
Christian in concept. This is pretty on point:

          Many throughout Christian history have perceived a common 
          thread in these parables of Jesus: the grace of God is something 
          that upsets settled human notions about merit, about what is 
          deserved, and what is due as recompense.

Burton L. Mack sez that the parables are Cynic or Cynic-inspired.
The Cynics gave us satire. And free lunch. And let us not forget. . . .

          And on they fly. The ship by now has grown as large as a small 
          city. There are neighborhoods, there are parks. There are slum 
          conditions. It is so big that when people on the ground see it in 
          the sky, they are struck with selective hysterical blindness and 
          end up not seeing it at all.
          AtD, p. 1084

This is a heaven-in-progress, it seems as though it's still in need of
"a few small adjustments." But what would Pynchon's heaven be 
without something to joke about? A-a-and that "hysterical blindness",
"Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you."

Which reminds me, my wife picked up a copy of "An Incomplete 
Education" by Judy Jones and William Wilson, a highbrow 
version of one of those "Uncle John's Bathroom Readers". 
Great little squib on Quaterninions:

          Nature: The complex number concept extended from two 
          dimensions to four.

          History: First suggested by William Hamilton in 1843 in 
          response to his personal successes with complex numbers. 
          Subsequently taken into even more dimensions—just as 
          you suspected it would be.

          Practical Uses: Engineers get into them. But you're up past 
          your beditme.

          Mathematical resonances: The feeling that, once having learned 
          to walk, one can run. Also fly. The lesson here is that when you 
          extend numbers beyond the complex stage, you can do so at 
          the expense of something called permanence; one by one, 
          properties you took for granted fall away. For instance, with 
          quaterninions, you have to give up either the role 0 plays or 
          multiplicative commutativity (i.e., x times y no longer equals 
          y times x). Say good night, Gracie.

But considering OBA's greatest Grand-Daddy and "Meritorious Price",
I'd take a close look at "Sola gratia":

          Sola gratia is one of the five solas propounded to summarise the 
          Reformers' basic beliefs during the Protestant Reformation; it is 
          a Latin term meaning grace alone. The emphasis was in 
          contradistinction to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church 
          of the day. Catholic doctrine, as defined by the Council of Trent, 
          holds that salvation is made possible only by grace; the faith 
          and works of men are secondary means that have their origins 
          in and are sustained by grace. (See Catechism of the Catholic 
          Church No. 1987-2029.)

          During the Reformation, Protestant leaders and theologians generally 
          believed the Roman Catholic view of the means of salvation to be a 
          mixture of reliance upon the grace of God, and confidence in the 
          merits of one's own works performed in love, pejoratively called 
          Legalism. The Reformers posited that salvation is entirely 
          comprehended in God's gifts (that is, God's act of free grace), 
          dispensed by the Holy Spirit according to the redemptive work 
          of Jesus Christ alone. Consequently, they argued that a sinner 
          is not accepted by God on account of the change wrought in 
          the believer by God's grace, and indeed, that the believer is 
          accepted without any regard for the merit of his works—for no 
          one deserves salvation, a concept that some take to the extreme 
          of Antinomianism.

          Sola gratia is different from Sola fide because faith alone is 
          considered either a work or is insufficient for salvation which 
          can only be granted freely by God to whom He chooses. 
          This doctrine is especially linked with Calvinism's unconditional 
          election and predestination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_gratia

From: The Nature of the Soul and Salvation in Christianity and Buddhism
M. Alan Kazlev

          Christianity is the religion of the heart, or feeling, yet it has 
          allowed the heart to develop without the necessary counterbalance 
          from the head, or the thinking faculty. The result that we have in 
          Christianity a religion that on the one hand is superb in its emphasis 
          on brotherly love and the all-powerful Grace and mercy of the 
          Divine, on the other is so lacking in metaphysical understanding 
          that it sees the Divine as a kind of friendly "Big Brother" in the sky 
          (or even for the evangelical / born again types, as it has been 
          pointed out sarcastically, a cosmic bellboy, just pray for something 
          and He is obliged to answer), while being totally incapable of seeing 
          the possibility of human consciousness transcending its imperfect 
          humanness.

          Buddhism, in contrast, is the religion of the head, of thinking and 
          analysis and self-discipline through mental self-control and 
          focussing (meditation). It provides techniques of self-transfor-
          mation so sadly lacking in Christianity. It also has the insight to 
          understand that the human personality - or anything else in the 
          cosmos for that matter - is not a fixed thing, created by God for 
          all eternity, but a sort of flux or continuum, no more possessing 
          a constant nature than does the wave which passes over the 
          surface of the water. This is an insight which exoteric Christianity, 
          with its emphassi on duality, lacks.

http://www.kheper.net/topics/religion/Christianity_and_Buddhism.html

Although the "Sins of the Father" are visited on the son as Kit
gets into "Dive-bombing into the future", Kit has a technique up
his sleeve [inside his throat actually] that enables him to pull
out of his tailspin, as we will soon see.