V-2nd, Chap 7

[Robin Landseadel]

That's the thing that's different about Pynchon's rocks, see --  
they're sensate, with a soul in every stone.

The heresies of Pynchon go far past the borders of the Puritan, those  
sensate stones and Pan-Shamanic Empires didn't storm their way into  
his books by virtue of a Pavlovian Calvinist counterinsurgency, but by  
having his doors of perception blown off.

Once you start hanging out in that neck of the woods, it's only a  
matter of time before the Witches come out to play with you.

On Sep 26, 2010, at 9:33 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> We mentioned David S. Reynolds's _Beneath the American Renaissance:
> The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville_ where
> we find in the chapter, "Types of American Womanhood", a discussion of
> the profound influence the "last puritan", as he is called, Jonathan
> Edwards had on American thought and on its literature. Edwards's brand
> of Calvinism (he had one foot in the Puritan world and one in the
> Enligtenment world..not unlike Henry Adams who had one foot in the
> 20th century and one foot in the 19th leaning toward the 18th)
> combines the Enlightenment cosmology that features a God who has not
> simply turned His key in the Newtonian clock-work-universe and walked
> away, but has deliberatley cut Himself off from Humanity. In His
> terrifying inscrutability He still torments Man who is reduced to a
> worthless wretch. The response to Edwards, in part, is the Angel, who
> functions as Angels do in Roman Catholicism. This Angelic figure is
> familiar to readers as Hester Prynn who is, of course, no mere Angel,
> but the Virgin whose child is the Magical Pearl.
> Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
> Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
> And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
> Thine individual being, shalt thou go
> To mix forever with the elements,
> To be a brother to the insensible rock