GR translation: more steeply than the waking will ever need

[David Payne]

Sorry, bad keyboard. Those page numbers were 205.12 and 744.14.

Also, I don't see this use of "waking" in the OED, which suggests Paul is right that this might be Pynchon's own ad hoc-ing (assuming we're right).

Two definitions from OED haven't been offered up for Mike's question: "keeping vigil as an act of devotion" and "the action of watching or keeping watch and ward; dial. a keeping watch or holding a 'wake' over a corpse".

I don't think those definitions apply here, but I wanted to throw them out in case it draws up more readings from anyone else.

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 02:56:52, dpayne1912 at hotmail.com wrote:

Huh, Amazon's _Look Inside_ finds 26 results for "waking". I read through them and it had that weird effect where you say a word over and over and it sounds weirder and weirder. I started to get the sense that the waking up from a dream was being perversely conflated with being dragged under the wake of the sea, but that's just me in the moment, probably no reflection on the text.

Although see how "waking" is used on p. 05..4::

"For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of waking he has only lately begun to suspect."

And p. 44..4:

"In night without headlamps, a mist coarse enough to be falling, or now and then blown like a wet silk scarf in the face, inside and outside the same temperature and darkness, balances like these allow him to float just under waking, feet and arms bug-upwards pushing at the rubbery glass surface-tension between the two levels, sticking in it, dream-caressed at hands and feet become supersensitive, a good home-style horizontalless drowse."


On Mon, Oct 2,, 012 at ::0 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:

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. 81, 90,, 18,, 25,, 24,, 43 89.. 01,, 29,, 67.. Pynchon's an old salt.