While researching the Sixties

[Mark Kohut]

I've uncovered a few Cute Correspondences with
some of Pynchon's themes and words and favorite things.

C. P. Snow again, who, besides his famous *Two Cultures [*1959]
delivered a lecture in January 1961 entitled *"On the Moral Unneutrality*
*of Science." *in which he says he has observed a distinct shift in the
culture about science/ scientists since the 30's and 40's. An unalloyed
good thing
in itself then, the view started to shift. "[For Rutherford] the world of
science
was a world that lived on a plane above the nation-state, and lived there
with joy." *
[And he was not alone]....

Now [1961] is different. " [Although] I, to a large extent share the moral
attitudes of
those scientists who devoted themselves to making the bomb...the trouble
is, when you get into any
kind of moral escalator, to know whether you're ever going to get off. When
scientists became
soldiers, they gave up something"......"There is a moral difference."

Snow's late volume in his long series of novels, his sixties novel, *The
Sleep of Reason* is
about this, the summaries say.  Lots of scientists and politicians talking
and thinking about the bomb.
Yet also a clear negative perspective on the sixties movements and actions.
Reason sleeping there
as well.

And by the end of the decade, when Mumford's *Pentagon of Power, *all about
this complicity,  gets a
front-page NYT Book Review rave.....the decade has shifted strongly and
shown itself.

Snow also wrote a late book called *The State of Siege, *that admittedly
unoriginal phrase which TRP uses powerfully
in *Against the Day. *[ bonus fact: Camus wrote a play with this title I
did not even know of nor remember--and I was
half-immersed in him at one early point of my life--because it is described
as a very minor work.]

** 'above the nation-state"*---the way the Chums start out in AtD,
then.....what are they by the end? A huge nation-state
combination?