M & D. 'scuse me while I pierce the sky'.

[Mark Kohut]

Pynchon is a very ambitious writer, he says obviously. Takes on about
Everything and the Cosmos and History too.

it has been remarked that many of Pynchon's novels open with an
against the sky, from the sky, scene. [test yourself, no extra credit]
M & D does in a beautiful down-on-earth way perhaps counterpointed to
the famously overfamous GR opening.

The sky, the heavens have carried cosmic literary meaning since
Genesis (and surely older for all I know). Writers show/declare a
perspective--what, though?--with this trope.

But besides the arcing snowball to begin M & D, Pynchon has used two
scientists, astronomers and mathematicians whose work CONSTANTLY,
daily, had to invoke the movement of 'the heavens".
Their work came out of the science of The Enlightenment.

"Music of the spheres', a phrase to express a cultural tacit
understanding of cosmic harmony.

Plato, Pliny, Cicero and Ptolemy are amongst the philosophers of the
ancient world who contemplated the music of the spheres. The doctrine
was transmitted to medieval Europe where it found its most glorious
expression in the architecture of great abbeys and cathedrals
consciously designed to conform to the proportions of musical and
geometric harmony. The English hermeticist Robert Fludd (1574-1637)
visualised grand celestial scales spanning three octaves and linking
levels of existence from the sub-planetary elemental worlds to
exultant choirs of angelic intelligences beyond the stars. The
beautiful engravings which illustrate Fludd's encyclopaedic works are
amongst the most comprehensive descriptions of pre-Copernican
cosmology ever devised. [4]

Talk amongst yourselves.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l