GR translation: more steeply than the waking will ever need

[David Payne]

I think Paul's right, too. 

I think that the tears filling her eyes echos this sense of the war between the sea and the stuff on land. 

Also, the next paragraph on 228 starts with "Waves crash and drag at the stones of the beach."

In the phrase, "trying to spill them into the sea and be rid of this", what does "this" mean? The people? The moment? Everything that is "not sea"? 

Your answer probably depends on what you think is trying to "spill them into the sea". Is it the wake that cannot reach them, or the vertiginous angle of the esplanade?

----- Original Message -----
On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

I should be more explicit in trying to answer Mike's question.

By my calculation, "waking" here means the production of turbulence by boats or ships moving through the water.  Creating a wake. Making waves.

The -ing form  of this kind of wake may be ad hoc-- of Pynchon's invention-- but the ordinary noun form, used literally or figuratively in this sense, occurs in the book ten times.  By Kindle count.  PP. 181, 190, 218, 225, 324, 343 389. 501, 529, 667. Pynchon's an old salt.

Slow no wakes.

On Oct 21, 2012, at 11:56 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:

P227.38-228.7  They are standing among black curly skeletons of iron benches, on the empty curve of this esplanade, banked much more steeply than the waking will ever need: vertiginous, trying to spill them into the sea and be rid of this. The day has grown colder.

Neither of them can stay balanced for long, every few seconds one or the other must find a new footing. He reaches and turns up the collar of her coat, holds her cheeks then in his palms . . . is he trying to bring back the color of flesh? He looks down, trying to see into her eyes, and is puzzled to find tears coming up to fill each one, soaking in among her lashes, mascara bleeding out in fine black swirls . . . translucent stones, trembling in their sockets. . . .

What does "the waking" refer to here?