V---2nd Epilogue

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:
> MB:
> "I also believe that the choice of 1859 as the year Sidney Stencil
> discerned some sort of disease entering the world was because he
> himself was born that year (he mentions "sixty years on the go"
> (543-44))"
>
>
> NICE deducing....New thought to me.....YES!.....But it is because TRP
> chose him to be born then?..........
>

well, what I was originally thinking was it's a form that his
self-loathing takes, that he thinks that he himself is the disease.
But he really isn't that kind of thinker.

> when the disease started............when capitalism "took off" way beyond
> small merchant, farmer, village size?.....

so that his nostalgia for a simpler time embodies the theme Pynchon chose?
That's possible, and certainly nostalgia crops up plenty.

However, I want to also return to 1859 as the year of Riemann's
hypothesis, which is underlined by the title of Stencil's paper: The
Situation as an N-Dimensional Mishmash.

N-dimensional - highly suggestive, redolent of Riemannian implications.