AtD translation: masses

[David Morris]

Of course you have found one meaning that was surely intended, but remember
the word “relevant” is the modifier.  When one looks at a work of art, a
painting, the connoisseur advises one to step backwards, just like this,
until the details blurr a bit.  You are even told to squint your eyes, so
that you intentionally lose focus, in order to “see” an abstracted
version.  A Gestalt understanding of what you are looking at.

“Gestalt psychology, gestaltism or configurationism is a school of
psychology that emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and
Germany as a theory of perception that was a rejection of basic principles
of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist
psychology.”

Gestalt psychologists emphasized that organisms perceive entire patterns or
configurations, not merely individual components. The view is sometimes
summarized using the adage, "the whole is more than the sum of its parts."


On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 1:33 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> P689.29-35   "The railroads seem to be the key. If one keeps looking at the
> map while walking slowly backward across the room, at a certain precise
> distance the structural principle leaps into visibility—how the different
> lines connect, how they do not, where varying interests may want them to
> connect, all of this defining patterns of flow, not only actual but also
> invisible, potential, and such rates of change as how quickly one’s
> relevant masses can be moved to a given frontier . . .
>
> Is this what the word "masses" mean here:
>
> *b.* *Military*. A close formation of troops, *esp.* one in which the
> battalions, etc., are arranged one behind another.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>