the secret differentiation or integration of parts

[Monte Davis]

My goodness! How very well organized of him to have said it all in a 1964
short story. That way it wouldn't still be hanging around in 1973, and
Gravity's Rainbow wouldn't need to be all cluttered up with stepped Dutch
gables and film frames and dv/dT's and integral-symbol-shaped tunnels... or
Mason & Dixon with timepieces and longitudes and personal equations... or
Against the Day with relativity and Riemann zeta functions. 

And how very convenient that an etymological accident -- the use of the word
"integration" both for an operation in calculus and for a social/political
issue in the US of the 1950s and 1960s -- should tell us all we need to know
about Pynchon, the 400 years of history through which he prospects, and one
of the greatest intellectual edifices of those 400 years. (By the way --
that edifice, much broader than its origins in calculus, is more generally
known  as "analysis." Thanks to your insight, I now realize that Dr.
Hilarius sums up Pynchon and analysis.)

Indeed, one must wonder sometimes why he writes such looooong books, when an
oracular one-liner on the P-list can say so much.  

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of alice wellintown
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 7:50 AM
To: pynchon -l
Subject: the secret differentiation or integration of parts

the short story sums up Pynchon and math.