Pynchon's Winding Stair

[alice wellintown]

As a line in Proverbs says " better is a dinner of herbs, where love is"

Proverbs 17:1 Better is a dry morsel and quietness with it Than a
house full of feasting with strife.

Copying law papers being proverbially a dry, husky sort of business,
my two scriveners were fain to moisten their mouths very often with
Spitzenbergs to be had at the numerous stalls nigh the Custom House
and Post Office.

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner,
properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian, then; but no; he never
eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts.

Much has been written about Melville's short story, "Bartleby the
Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street." That Pynchon identifies with
Bartleby, and by extension Thoreau, Byron and the Luddites, the
passive resistance of King and Gandhi, and with Melville, the modern
American author whose ambiguities continue to fascinate and generate
thought provoking essays from inside and outside the Tower... [frag] &
Co. ....

http://web.ku.edu/~zeke/bartleby/stein.html
http://jsse.revues.org/index575.html
http://web.ku.edu/~zeke/bartleby/wright.html