V---2nd, Chap 16 Valletta...another reason why chosen?

[alice wellintown]

The siege in Pynchon, is a State, as anarchy and subversive passions
loom, as fascist forces within and without (see all that French MF and
D&G, poorly written postmodern psycho-babble blubbering that graduate
students suck on) exclude and preclude the middle way or ground, where
gravity exerts its inexorable force constant, where benzine rings
sucks its tail/tale/tally, but Nature or Life is a scatterbrain, a
paradox, a contradiction, an adaptations infinite and mysterious.

At his best, P traces the coming of age of America the Romance.

Life is an active principle, not in the sense that gravity and
chemical reactions are active principles, but in a quite different
sense. Gravity and chemical reactions are always the same, inflexible
and uncompromising; but life is ever variable and adaptive; it will
take half a loaf if it cannot get a whole one. Gravity answers yea and
nay. Life says, "Probably; we will see about it; we will try again
to-morrow."
     -John Burroughs

The short story, "The Secret Integration," is the most cogent
narrative for grasping young P's take on this, not V., and Henry Adams
is the source.

>From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos,
direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through
multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of
education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art,
politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when
it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in
becoming tame.

_The Education of Henry Adams_