BtZ42 Read

[Ian Livingston]

“There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds
across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring
its own light? Will the light come before ar after?

But it is already light, GR 5.



Are we beyond the zero at this point? What, exactly, *is* the zero?


Is this birth? Is it Ra emerging from the egg? Are we at this point
entering the new myth of the New Age? A myth peopled with


“an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching
empty or near-empty bottles, here draped owver a cair, there huddled into a
cold firplace, or sprawled on various divans, un-Hoovered rugs and and
chaise lonues down the different levels of enormous room, shoring and
wheezing at many rhythms, in self-renewing chorus as London light, winter
and elastic light, grows between the faces of the mullioned windows, grows
among the strata of last night;s smoke still hung, fading  from the waxed
beams of the ceiling. All these horizontal here, these comrades in arms,
look just as rosy as a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of their certain
resurrection in the next few minutes“ GR 5

“[I]f a purely hierarchic distinction is at once a criterium too general
and too imprecise, there is nothing left to characterize the sacred in its
relation to the profane except their heterogeneity. However, this
heterogeneity is sufficient to characterize this classification and to
distinguish it from all others, because it is very particular: it is
absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists no other example
of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically
opposed to one another“ Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life (1915, 1964) 33.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160316/470bf198/attachment.html>