BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): at the window while he sleeps

[Monte Davis]

end of P. 57 -> P. 58

Foxes and dogs again, among the latter a painted pointer "alerted by the
eternal scent, the explosion over his head always just about to come." Good
boy, Tyrone!

http://www.old-print.com/mas_assets/full3/J5141807/J5141807448.jpg
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/43/02/f0/4302f06cbc44b3b2e6fbc371f51b2bce.jpg


What makes these images -- standard English fare at the time  for exurban
bourgeois as well as country-house aristocracy -- "even more autumnal,
necropolitical, than prewar hopes"..? This section has reminded us before
and will remind us again that Roger & Jessica's evasion  of the war is
temporary and precarious -- but here we're told that golden autumnal
meadows are *becoming* a City of the Dead (necropolis). Just a _memento
mori_ for the lovers, for a nostalgic English self-image? More?

58.11-15: something blocks Roger's speech, and "how does she know... so
exactly what Roger meant to say?" (Reinforcing 56.37's "Roger really wants
other people to know what he’s talking about. Jessica understands that.") A
hug, melting into arousal for both, is more than a consolation prize for
"failure to communicate" -- it *is* communication, "mind-to-mind."

58.16 brings us back to the framing night of winter solstice. Perhaps the
clinch just above was earlier the same night -- the section began with "pillows
in front of the fire. Roger’s clothing... scattered all about." Or perhaps
all their nights here are one, off the timeline and off the books.

58.24: "Pointsman’s... his... a bleakness whenever she meets him.
Scientist-neutrality." How does that differ from Roger's commitment to the
data and only the data about rocketfalls, which was only recently "cheap
cynicism"...? Or is Roger's version of neutrality less creepy to her
*because* it makes him uncomfortable even as he insists on it? NB he
repeatedly, parodically *plays* the mad scientist in exchanges with her. If
I didn't know that Pynchon fears and condemns science like all good
creative souls, I'd think there's some quite interesting ambivalence being
modeled here.

58.33: "And the people who might have been asleep in the empty houses here
. .., are they dreaming of cities that shine all over with lamps at night,
of Christmases seen again from the vantage of children and not of sheep
huddled so vulnerable on their bare hillside, so bleached by the Star’s
awful radiance?"
Spoilers be damned, this is a sweet foretaste of the Advent evensong coming
up three nights from now (p. 127)
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