"grace' again

[Mark Kohut]

I am reading a book on liberalism in the US, using some novels and
novelists as well as non-fic thinkers, historians and public intellectuals
from mid-20th Century (mostly). Some stuff about/using Pynchon that I may
get scanned BUT for now:

It seems the very influential Reinhold Niebuhr, a public intellectual of
the 40s and thru the next couple-three decades--and still a stated,
self-discovered influence on Barack Obama wrote
this in *The Irony of American History* (Niebuhr is paraphrased by the
writer but the 'grace' note is a direct Niebuhr quote)

"NIebuhr's great foe appears to be a naive confidence that afflicts both
Marxist and bourgeois culture. Indeed, the 'grace' of American experience
has been it's comparative common sense, which has saved the United States
from trying to 'cut through the vast ambiguities of our historic situation
and thereby bring our destiny to a tragic conclusion by seeking to bring it
to a neat and logical one' ".

This meaning of grace in AtD easily might apply---not suggesting
necessarily that TRP has read Niebuhr, only that he might have had similar
perceptions---and, at the end of *Against the Day, *given that whole ship
of combined State(s)--Marxist and bourgeois--- that flies off into "grace",
he
seemed to have deep irony about 'grace' and history in mind..






On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 5:04 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> wrote:

>
> "The noted Quaternionist Dr. V. Ganesh Rao of Calcutta University was
> seeking a gateway to the Ulterior, as he liked to phrase it, having come to
> recognize the wisdom of simply finding silence and allowing Mathematics and
> History to proceed as they would." (p. 130)
>
> https://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/pynchon_against.htm
>
> John Rothfork: Tantra in Pynchon's *Against the Day*
>
> > ... What Pynchon calls grace seems to be related to what Hindus call
> *rasa* that invites us to * taste* or savor experience rather than
> substituting talk, ideas, and explanations for the experience. (...) The
> answer to the complexities offered by the novel, if we can call it an
> answer, seems to be *rasa,* beauty, or grace ... <
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasa_(aesthetics)
>
>
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