Curious Pynchon echo

[Mark Kohut]

In Denis Johnson's *Train Dreams,* there is an unexpected scene where
the protagonist, a lifelong laborer born around the turn of the 20th century
takes a short vacation. His only one as presented in the novella.

He started working first on the railroad, that symbol and more of modernity,
but he worked on clearing the land, always grounded. He became a guy who
transported stuff by horse and cart when he got older. A life on the land
but not farming.
A "modern' life.

Once in midlife, flush with saved money, he took The Great Northern to
Spokane
for the county fair. It might have been a nice time but his first decision
"was a wrong one".
He took an (expensive) ride on a plane. His seat "about six feet off the
ground was already high enough"..he took off feeling "great amazement..he
was high in the sky while his stomach was somewhere else. It never did
catch up with him". .....''the earth's surface turned sideways and he lost
all sense of up and down".   [Remember "all that is solid melts into air"?]

THEN the pilot turns to him looking like a raccoon in his flying cap and
hollers and gestures but he cannot hear before the plane goes into a steep
dive which makes him feel his organs go into his spine and sends images of
the best moments of his life--such as is said of drowning persons---thru
his mind.

I could not help but think of the diving plane scene in Against the Day,
inspired perhaps, goes the major annotations, by Marinetti's Futurism*
beliefs, his embrace of the diving unto death that modernity has been
called.

       *Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy>, Futurism
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism>, that was a rejection of the past,
and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and
industry."--wikipedia


Did not expect to see such a possible echo in this work but he sets up
the clues--esp
the line about 'six feet being high enough'--and the plotless anomaly of
the whole scene.

Besides the pure, tough yet also lyrical realism that then gets weird--a
world perhaps touching this one without any clues (In the protagonist's
mind at least) presented as *more realism,*--that captures singularly one
representative life, Johnson adds a layer of symbolic meaning about the
20th Century and America.

Nice, I say, understatedly.
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