Very misc related to grace

[Markekohut]

If Lew is a reliable narrator at this point of the novel, and carrying the author's vision as Henry James put it, then his epiphanic awareness is that things as they are is what grace is. Bestowed from above?...anti-that consciously, subversively, satirically, mostly (in AtD I would say) and/or ' "as above, so below"......

and I think the mind-stretching ironies of the Chums " flying off into grace" at the end is, yes, the "grace" of its usual meanings turned so deeply around....as rockets and dog piss and so much else in AtD is bestowed from above...

The Chums fly off between the world wars which leads to the screaming across the skies in P's 
WW2 masterpiece is one of the resonances of that sublime ( to me) ending and meaning of grace.

P.S.  I think as I tried to articulate this latest reread, that P having Lew go "off the tracks" after we learn of some unnamed sin is P giving us the end of certain Calvinist --Lutheran religious notions around religious conceptions of grace and predestination ( in those religions) Puritanism. 


Sent from my iPad

On Nov 26, 2012, at 9:19 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think a definition of "Grace" is a benevolence from above.  A gift, not something earned or deserved, bestowed from a higher level.  At least that has a lot to do with Lutheran or Calvinist theology of Salvation.
> 
> On Monday, November 26, 2012, David Morris wrote:
>> Well said, Alice!
>> 
>> Paradox, Koans & Pretzil Logic R Pynchon.  Yin Yang is about all the blends of duality, rarely the opposites alone.  His BIG ideas aren't polemic, they're exploratory.
>> 
>> David Morris
>> 
>> On Monday, November 26, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:
>>> Pynchon likes to take on the BIG ideas (Entropy, History, Virginity,
>>> Gravity...Free Will & Grace) and turn them into pretzil logics or
>>> force them into Koans that paradoxically turn out to be ironic book of
>>> the dead (allusive parables) dead ends.
>>> 
>>> Now, I'm no expert on Grace, or Pynchon, but I suspect that his use of
>>> Grace is an example of the propensity described above, and
>>> specifically the paraodoxical BIG idea Grace/Free Will.
>>> 
>>> Why Pynchon does this or to what end is open to lotz of readings. I
>>> suspect that he does it because he is lazy; he re-worksd old material
>>> over and over again.
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