GR translation: except that the man was never really alive

[Mike Jing]

P264.24-37  “That stuff. Forget it. It’s not even our line. You ever try to
develop a polymer when there’s nothing but indole people around? With our
giant parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is
the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is to
observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf’s grave.
You haven’t spent much time with the indole crowd. They’re very elitist.
They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of
blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons
lost up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an unhallucinated day
in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—”
“Wait a minute. . . .”Jamf dead? “You say Jamf’s grave, now?” It ought to
be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was never really
alive so how can he be really—

By "the man was never really alive", I assume Slothrop means he has never
known Jamf in person, is that correct?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130309/b9ea39f4/attachment.html>