M&D CH 4 Notes

[Joseph Tracy]

> On Jan 24, 2018, at 2:07 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> CHAPTER 4
> p. 30
> 
> “to keep before him every day death, exile, and loss, believing it a
> condition of his spiritual Contract with the world as given?”
> 
> 
> This is the second mention of a contract one makes with the world
> around oneself (p. 14 “yet another Term in the Contract between the
> City and oneself) and there will be others (Mason speaking to Dixon
> about Maskelyne’s motivations on p. 182: “Has he in the Strangeness of
> his Solitude, reach’d a Compact with the Island, as if ‘twere
> sentient, has he in some way come to belong to it in Perpetuity?”).
> The juridical relationship of the soul to the world: is this some new
> kind of conception in the world? Certainly Cherrycoke hints at it with
> his thoughts on anonymity, names, and ownership in Ch. 1—and Ives
> reminds us of the law throughout.
> 
We have no power over external things, and the good that ought to be the object of our earnest pursuit, is to be found only within ourselves.  Epictetus

  Cherrycoke leans toward a philosophy that centers around a private contract which takes place in  the individual conscience and is ready to face death and loss. This is key to the inner conflicts of Mason and Dixon. 
 Epictetus sounds in the above quote to lean this way but in other sayings endorses all service to the state as good and noble. Cherrycoke, on the other hand, begins the fundamental lesson of his life with a distrust in a state addicted to enslavement and enforced conformity.  Quakers as much as anything represent the idea of individual enlightenment. Not ’The Truth' for all to live by. but emergent truth that begins and is limited to personal insight and conscience without a creed.   This philosophy may have very deep roots but is showing new faces at this time of the re-emergence of an attempt to formalize Democracy. -
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l