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

[Johnny Marr]

Thanks but I wish I could retype that opening paragraph - littered with
spelling mistakes!

On Thursday, March 26, 2015, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bravo!
>
> 2015-03-26 6:05 GMT+01:00 Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','marrja at gmail.com');>>:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150326/e4f62b18/attachment.html>