America in glory once & Gatsby West

[Mark Kohut]

p. 343-4 the Portola Expedition mural has them arriving "pretty close to here, in fact".  It is 1769---close enough in history to be M & D's time.

The picture's style was like "fruit and vegetable labels' from when Doc was a kid....delicious associations merging with lots of color, another Pynchon positive....'a green distance" and lots of trees.........and everyone looked GREAT; regular folk were like stars are today .......

"there was an expression of wonder [on the leader himself?], "like, What's this, what unsuspected paradise?"
 
I think 'wonder' had, at least, the resonance below. And De Tocqueville had it about America's natural beauty and bountifulness. Tony Tanner wrote a whole book about American writers with their sense of wonder as the bass line. 

Gatsby's famous end:
"face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

The West of america has always held Pynchon's sense of loving wonder.

In Inherent Vice, paradise is once again, gone.