V--2nd, Chap 9, after Robin's post with a short lead-off digression (for Robin)

[Mark Kohut]

And those two "crucial", yes!, paragraphs remind me of any/almost all 
deterministic
theories of history....Hegel, Marx, Spengler...and many more i don't know.......

Or theoryless-- "History is in the saddle and rides mankind"--ole Where's Waldo 
Emerson.

And, obvious again maybe, that clock, motif from early, that Cartesian notion of 
a clockwork 
world/universe..........it will be 'reforged and rehung"..............

Also, almost a foreshadowing of the Pavlovian metaphor of GR?


----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wed, October 13, 2010 1:33:39 PM
Subject: Re: V--2nd, Chap 9, after Robin's post with a short lead-off digression 
(for Robin)

All sorts of references to "Mirror Time" in this chapter. Fasching in May.

And this, which strikes me a crucial:

    Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. "You seem," he finally
    drawled, "to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History,
    the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally
    sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in
    the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

    "Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead
    weights of a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an
    ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well!
    Let a few of them melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the
    weights will be reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be
    one there in the shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right
    again, so much the worse for me."

That's onpage 246 in the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition.

On Oct 13, 2010, at 12:31 AM, Clément Lévy wrote:

> Very insightful BUT
> Mondaugen doesn't mean "world eye". "Der Mond" means "the Moon" in German! 
>Moon-eye!
> Clement
> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 3:29 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> 
>wrote:
> 
> 
> so Moondoggie - well, no: Mondaugen, "world eye" -