Inherent in Pynchon?
Carvill John
johncarvill at hotmail.com
Wed Nov 26 02:32:24 CST 2008
The word 'inherent' doesn't occur at all in GR, or COL49, or Vineland. BUt lookee here, in Mason & Dixon:
The Instrument awaits him, its nested Crystal Hemispheres, each tun’d to a Note of the Scale, carefully brought hither through reef’d-Topsail seas and likewise whelming Anxieties back at Lloyd’s regarding the inherent Vice of Glass added to the yet imperfectly known contingencies of voyage by Ship,—brought to shine in this commodious Corner, beneath a portrait of some Swedish Statesman too darken’d with Room-smoke for anyone to be sure who it is any more,—Oxenstjerna, Gyllenstjerna, Gyllenborg, who knows?—discussions often becoming quite spirited, though, of course, conducted in Swedish. It has hung there, growing into its Anonymity, since the early times of the Swedish settlers,—gazing into the room, at the nightly dramas of lost consciousness and squander’d Coin, at gaming and roaring and varieties inexhaustible of Argument. Behind it rises a Flight of stairs, up and down which creeps a ceaseless Traffick. Many pause to stare over the false Mahogany Railing at Dr. Franklin seated at his Glass Armonica, or down upon the Figures and into the Decolletages of Molly and Dolly, who not only have show’d up, but have brought along two more young women with similar ideas about Fashion. “These Doxies,” Mason mutters, “look ye,—they’re staring at me. I can feel myself becoming Unreasonably Suspicious.”
The 'inherent vice of glass', ha?
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