GR translation: nacreous wrinkling

[Monte Davis]

Nacre ('mother of pearl' is translucent in thin layers, but "wrinkles" light
passing through it as streams and beads of water on glass do: at a
microscopic scale by refraction, and at a macroscopic scale by variations in
thickness. 

 

 
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From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Mike Jing
Sent: Monday, October 21, 2013 1:24 AM
To: Pynchon Mailing List
Subject: GR translation: nacreous wrinkling

 

V471.5-20     Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she
knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like
Margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels
closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same journey: a
passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by that same nacreous
wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman,
dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror,
tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her
past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her
mind's flank . . . when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her
own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence. . . . In
her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed
ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone.
Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror in
the brightest how of afternoon . . . sails on the sea too small and distant
to matter . . . water too steel and cold. . . .

What is this "nacreous wrinkling" exactly?

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