AtD (37) p.1057 Discussion alert! Major meaning section, ?? thinks Host

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Self-clarity, not buying in to the beliefs of the powers-that-be, the Elect, whether they're religious, political, industrial, and/or military, lead Lew to that zen-like state of grace where things are exactly what they are.  The grace that the Chums fly to at the end, from this viewpoint, isn't a Biblical form of grace, but instead, the grace of self-knowledge and clarity (the clarity that we as readers in the present might have in looking back at the early 20th century?), simultaneously their own journey and their own destination.  Clarity and self-knowledge (grace) not being "good" in the Biblical, moral sense, but "good" in the sense that it implies intelligence?

Laura 

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Jul 29, 2008 4:50 PM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: AtD (37) p.1057 Discussion alert! Major meaning section, ?? thinks Host
>
>Lew Basnight, detective, a book-length thread of meanings in AtD has a revelation........
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>What does it mean?
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>Who are all these people Lew is interacting with at Carefree Court(!); a crowd even he, old L.A. hand, finds hard to "read"? Just a Hollywood crowd? or as broad a crossection of humanity as America was becoming--lotsa immmigrants in Hollywood---working daily in the 'new America' of 'mediated reality', not hard labor?
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>The flush, energetic, wide-open [much anti-Puritanism, say some historians, flapper and booze 1920s? Can we see the whole crooked timber of humanity'--Kant--at this gathering? ; "the whole stock and joint company" --[Ishmael in Moby Dick]--living working in the daylit fiction that is America?  
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>Lew   "seeing the great point and in the 'same instant' "recognizing the ongoing crime that had been his own life"....."Self-clarity" .........."a mortal sin"........????       
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>WTF?
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>Okay, pretty important revelation to understand Lew and more of AtD, yes? Why is such self-clarity a mortal sin? [Am I reading that right?]...."mortal sin" is a concept from the Western Christian tradition mostly. Shows Lew's religion in his upbringing [he is Presbyterian]. A mortal sin is one that totally cuts one off from God, goes the tradition. How could this 'self-clarity' totally cut him off from his God?....A revelation that his whole life had been 'an ongoing crime"...not acts he committed but his whole life. ?? 
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>Trying to catch this ragtag assembly of humanity is the ongoing crime?  This some W.A.S.T.E.-like motley group of human beings, 'displaying scars and tattoos, etc." all 'having survived some calamity" ??  
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>Or is Lew 'unreliable' in his reflections here?
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>So, once Lew recognized that it was a 'crime' to chase the preterites, as it were, then he is no longer on the side of the Elect?  No longer a believer in the Church's/Society's way of judging, so his 'mortal sin' is to not believe.?
>(THAT cuts one off from one's Christian God while one is in that state, fer sure).....
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> It is this that got him unambiguously dynamited into his new life. ???  Comments sought, please.
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>I have other thoughts which I will spare for now in order to open the discussion against my words above....
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