Re Laura's post and questions

[Mark Kohut]

I have always read the hotel door slamming as the end of the relationship. Birds being disturbed is not usually a good thing in TRPs fiction. That action led to this call from Pierce we are now reading about?  Others? 
 
Yes, I suspect she broke it off. (see the memory of his phone call, "Pierce please,... I thought we had" ----This is what the dumper keeps saying) " We get no tangible reasons from her as to why. (that bust of Jay Gould, PI's icon, and his dreams----not her dreams? I think she had accepted that in him long before whatever broke them up.)  Especially, for the Oedipa of this book, of the times, I've thought that maybe Pierce would not "commit"? From college lovers to sometime after----it was time. He was not 'finding himself'; he was successful. 
 
 Re those birds in the lobby: 
Think P, science wonk,  might have known of "the butterfly effect" as it crystallized in 1963? : 
Lorenz published his findings in a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences noting that "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever."  Wikipedia
 
Remember weather in The Small Rain and Entropy? 
 
Yes, I saw Pierce as older, noticeably so, since I see Oedipa as @Pynchon's age, therefore around 27 in 1964 and I find it hard to imagine that PI could have gotten so rich so young in the 60s. 
 
HOWEVER, if they are much closer in age, Cornell lovers, then it lends lots of circumstantial evidence to the notion that Pierce INHERITED a lot, yes?  I am convinced by Robin, especially as he finds a Pierce & Co in the ruins of Pynchon & Company, that TRP has objectified
an "inheritance" ---or disinheritance---from his personal family history.
 
Oedipa did NOT marry Pierce. She did NOT inherit a fortune. She married a hypersensitive man, very thin-skinned who felt lost lives. 
 
P is, in the sensibility of C of L49, Oedipa, yes? The most empathetic of TRPs protagonists, to quote that Robin critic.  Her quest is his, thematized, full of 'objective correlatives' as P's fave T. S. Eliot called
them. In a way, C of L49 is a portrait of an artist? .