M&D - Chapter 18 - Up Late Between the Stars

[Johnny Marr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/

It widely acknowledge among the scienticif community that the human mind
has an outstanding capacity for recognising patterns and sequences. It's
also widely acknowledge that the human mind has an outstanding capacity for
perceiving patterns, regardless of how meaningful the data actually is.

Pynchon's entire body of work both encourages, and can be guilty
of/provides myriad examples of pattern recognition. Mason, like many of
TRP's previous characters, seems to find structure and wider implications
in what others might dismiss out of hand as a series of coincidences.

Bradley seems to have had the same complex. He reported on the comets of
1723 and 17377, but not 1744 ("one day to be term'd the finest of the
Century"), as this was also the year of his marriage to Susannah, nor in
the 1757, the year she passed away. Mason himself, "desperate with longing"
of his own for Susannah,  can't resist connecting "the fast-moving image of
a female head in the Sky, its hair streaming in a Wind inconceivable, with
posthumous visitation".

He never approached the subject with Bradley, not even in 1759 when Rebekah
died a month before Halley's Comet. Instead, Mason found himself by
Rebekah's deathbed,

"And when she was so close that there could remain no further doubt, how
did he hold himself from crying out after the stricken bright Prow of her
Face and Hair, out there so alone in the Midnight, unshelter'd, on display
to ev'ry 'Gazer with a Lens at his disposal? He could not look too
directly...as if he rear'd a direct stare from the eyes he fancied he saw,
he could but take fugitive Squints, long enough to measure the great Flow
of Hair gone white, his thumbs and fingers busy with the Micrometer, no
time to linger upon Sentiments, not beneath this long Hovering, this
undesired Recognition".

It's hard to do justice to such a tender passage of writing. I'll limit
myself to mentioning that Mason's wiedling of his technical equipment in
the face of his wife's departure seems like a helpless retreat rather than
a stubborn, blind petty obsession. I'll also add that Pynchon deploys the
word quotinoctian [every day] to pleasing effect.

In further retreat from the pain of worldly loss, Mason spends his night of
bereavement in his Observatory, listening to hear Rebekah's ghostly
approach amongst the Owls and night creatures, either hearing or convincing
himself that he's heard "the Sound itself that possess'd them, an
independent Force, using them as a way into the Secular Air, its purposes
in the world far from the Rodents of the Hill-side, mysterious to all".

Pattern recognition provides Mason's occupation, his vocation and his curse.
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