Saure Trauben der Mathematik

[Prashant Kumar]

Mark, forgive me, I should have said, *only *things-in-themselves.

This reminds me of the english lolly scene in GR. By the time of AtD he is
able to do with maths what he did with english lollies. His charlatanry is
honed to the point of being functionally equivalent to understanding. I
know he probably doesn't understand the Riemann conjecture. But I have a
degree in maths and I can read him without dissonance. This is beautiful to
me.

P.

On 4 August 2012 23:40, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Pynchon has, as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson,  the ability to take,
> quickly, and make use of the works of others; he manages, as Cowart,
> in his latest book admits, to get the critical reader reading,
> searching, re-searching. So Cowart admits to reading a Santayana text
> to discover what P may have understood from it and how P may have made
> use of it.  This is, while absurd, not a complete waste, as Sanatayana
> is a far better thinker and writer than P in many respects and, while
> pragmatism, as discussed in several critical studies of P, may not be
> all that significant in the fictional lives of P characters, it does
> make it into the books. P is a theft; he robs from the rich and the
> poor, puts things together, shores his fragments against our ruins.
> The reader who attributes all that knowledge of, say math,  to P,  is
> probably smarter than Pin math, but not as clever.  Authors can make
> much of nothing much; it is their business to make, with magic, use of
> shadows and smoke and mirrors and words. That is what makes a
> Hawthorne or a Melville, or even an Emerson, who in the end, is more a
> n author of fictions, than we may be willing to accept. Pynchon has to
> fool us. But we are not fools. We  are, as Prospero reminds us,
> Shakespearean jesters too. We play the play and the play is the thing.
>
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