Not P but Moby-Dick (35)

[Mark Kohut]

man.....the first man and his descendants.....asking the cosmos the meaning
of life.....

On Wed, Nov 1, 2023 at 3:17 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> From Chapter 50:
>
> —those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these
> modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s
> primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct
> recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed
> each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they
> were created and to what end;  when though, according to Genesis, the
> angels indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the
> uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
>
> What does "they" refer to in "and asked of the sun and the moon why they
> were created and to what end"?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>