inconvenience

[Mark Kohut]

either mine or yours. We have explored the meanings
in Pynchon.

Some have wondered who this great writer about America, this
great novelist of ideas about America (and their failure as ideals so
often);
this voracious self-educated writer who went after whatever he could
to create and deepen his vision; this writer who wrote that his influences
were right there, on the surface of his prose; who spins Emerson and
Melville
and so many others into his allusions and associations,-- who else he has
read.
With the concept of chance in AtD and a few other key concepts, some wonder
about America's greatest philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. I have here
anyway.

CS had some of his most important work--essays,papers, whatever we call
them---appear on
popular monthlies of his time. Wide early readership, a couple of them
became the best introduction
to some key notions. They have been anthologized and are part of
about every intro book on Pierce
written. Books available when TRP was reading everything.

A long introduction to make one point: he only had to read these couple
papers to be able to scavenge
some ideas and words even for his work. His deeply American work as
Pierce's philosophy is the
deep fountainhead of America's major contribution to philosophy,
pragmatism. William James himself said so; some of Pierce's
major ideas influenced the more famous great philosopher, L Wittgenstein
when they were
brought to him and discussed like the world depended on it by Frank Ramsey,
young genius who died
young.

Second point and subject header: I have recently reread one of those early
pieces. *The Fixation of Belief.*
Look it up. How a lifetime of scattered living and supposedly thinking
makes one see it all differently. (Just as
rereading *The Stranger *after a lifetime made it almost an entirely
different book for me.) Anyway, in that essay.
Pierce is tackling Descartes and his "certainty' over knowledge. One can
lift it from that real context and see it
as a piece on anyone's certain certainty, so to speak. Psychologically
seen, which is the late mind surprise:

"Still oftener, the distinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, --[I
interject a reference to Fromm's Escape From Freedom,
a book which has been circumstantially proven to be a pynchon influence in
its themes]--exaggerated into vague dread of doubt, makes menacing
spasmodically to the views they already take. The man feels that, if only
he holds to his belief without wavering, it will be entirely satisfactory.
Nor can it be denied that a stead and immovable faith yields great peace of
mind, It may, indeed, give rise to *inconveniences [emphases mine],*
as if a man should resolutely continue to believe that fire would not burn
him, of that he would be eternally damned
if he received his *ingesta *otherwise than through a stomach pump."

Who knows, eh? but we know that inconveniences in Pynchon are happenings
that challenge one's beliefs in action, played with ironically as well by
that fun guy TRP, not just
minor problems we solve as the word has come to mean, it seems.