a soul in every stone

[Ian Livingston]

Duh. Wish I had caught on to this sooner. Pynchon's finger here is
pointing toward Spinoza, by way of Schiller in Weimar Germany.
Remember the Ninth Symphony whose pantheistic Sturm und Drang, starts
out romancing brotherhood with all things and ends up as a
quasi-anarchistic call to arms against the status quo? Schiller, of
course. Why didn't I make the connection?

-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant