V---2nd Epilogue

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:
> [the term "nostalgia"] implies
> a sentimental desire to go back, to relive, a time you already lived
> through............
>
> Pynchon can not really be nostalgic for a time a hundred years before he
> lived..I think it is
> part of his vision of the ideal good life (if certain of those values/conditions
> could have continued into the present)
>  which got diseased, as stated, by things from 1859 on.....
>
>

to some extent, sure; it's ok to be a Luddite...
that healthy respect for the good things in history, for the leaves
now fallen from the world-tree that were good in their own time -
and we shall not see their like again, and it's worth the effort to
learn their sayings, marvel at their prodigies, for the sheer wonder
of it if nothing else

as Joyce said, only half-mockingly, "...one feels at one with one who once..."

But I'm lobbying for Pynchon as a mathematical moralist, in addition
to, or even as a way of expressing his historical vision...

seems to me that he is prone to rapturous prose describing Kit's
electrical insights, Tesla's exploits, the intermission in Goettingen,
even Riemann's dying days and the mathematical museum, and not as
respectful of the number-line accountancy math practiced by Vibe.

You have to have imaginary numbers to have even a 2-dimensional
co-ordinate system, don't you?

and now I'm wondering If there is a zeta function implicit in the
alternation between realistic and magical-realistic sections in these
novels...

(as Stencil soliloquized, "Enough, lad....You're in dangerous waters."
 It's only a hop, skip and jump to the idea of a co-ordinate system
fleshed out beyond the pure starkness of mathematical formulae to
enliven other thought-experiments - Stencil's trinity-thoughts as a
3-dimensional co-ordinate system of sorts, within which to place
various historical developments, so forth)

back to the relativistic thoughts of Stencil:

"Which way does it go?  As a youth [said the old man, I took to the
law, and argued each case with my wife.  The muscular strength that it
gave to my jaw has lasted the rest of my life...]

...As a youth, I believed in social progress because I saw chances for
personal progress of my own.  Today, at age sixty, having gone as far
as I'm about to go, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and if
you're right, for my society as well.  But then: suppose Sidney
Stencil has remained constant after all - suppose instead sometime
between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one
ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle
- blending in with the evens of history, no different one by one but
altogether - fatal.  This is how the public, you know, see the late
war.  As a new and rare disease which has now been cured and conquered
forever."


salient points:
a) Stencil's initial, probably correct, point of view is that his
point of view is colored by his position in life
b) and therefore that his intimations of mortality increasingly shape
his notions of what is possible politically
c) this sort of correction for known errors is one of the hallmarks of
a good thinker

d) that "if you're right" - he's entertaining Mehemet's parable of
futility, rather than adopting it

e) "so let us say that my perception of the world deteriorating is not
actually a side effect of my own aging (from - among other causes -
greater knowledge and experience of the world's pain) but that the
world itself is actually getting worse"

f) and then apparently exercises reductio ad absurdum (so what he is
actually getting at is a refutation of Mehemet) - he says, in essence,
this is a mistake like to that made by the masses of people who were
surprised by the War

-  they ignore plentiful evidence of common trajectories toward War,
preferring to be surprised by it

- just as an aging person might tend to think poorly of what the world
has become, not relating that feeling to his subjective experience