M&D Deep Duck Read. Either a repeat post or another variation

[Mark Kohut]

I know I sent out something I had researched re Carl Becker
including, perhaps, a relevant book that I think was linked
in the real world to Thomas. Sorry if it was this

But, here it is again, linked to something about the Line and
the heavenly spheres trope:

On the Line and M & D IRL:
http://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/march-2014/epic-survey-mason-and-dixon...
The most advanced instruments of their time. They measured by the
heavens. There is the famous phrase 'music of the spheres"....a cosmos
in harmony with itself....theirs is
a mapping via the spheres. Similar 'As above, so below' coherence in
the late 18th Century?

(Although I can never find the citation again, so maybe it is a
created 'memory',
during the kefuffle over Ian McEwan's supposed plagiarism, when
Pynchon signed that letter in his friend's defense and in defense of
using real history in fictional history, I 'remember' Ian saying that
TRP had once borrowed from--or lent him?-- the classic "The Heavenly
City of the 18th Century Philosophers" from him.

Wikipedia
"This title challenges the belief that the 18th century was
essentially modern in its temper. Carl Becker demonstrates that the
period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far
from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a
medieval world, and that these philosophers "demolished the Heavenly
City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date
materials".
 In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at the book's continuing
relevance within the context of current discussion about the
Enlightenment.

http://www.amazon.com/Heavenly-City-Eighteenth-Century-Philosophers/dp/0300101503/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419164861&sr=1-1&keywords=heavenly+city+of+the+eighteenth+century+philosophers

I read this in college, worth it and, yes, I'd say he 'lent' it to
Ian. I am browsing it again.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l