If there is any

“If there is any political moral to be found in this world,” Stencil once wrote in his journal, “it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by mainpulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.

What of the real present, the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly alienated populace within not many years.”

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 441, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

History, the proverb says

History, the proverb says is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn’t fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 215, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

He had decided

He had decided a long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogenous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.

Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 174, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

Until last year

Until last year along came theFashoda crisis and quite early one morning Covess was discovered in spats and a pith helmet, working his way around Piccadilly trying to recruit volunteers to invade France. Therehad been some idea of commandeering a Cunard liner. By the time they caught him he’d sworn in several coster-mongers, two streetwalkers and a music-hall comedian. Stencil remembered painfully that they all had been singing Onward, Christian Soldiers in various key and tempi.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 174, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)

Perhaps history this century

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of the fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else.

By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartemented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the ’30s, the curious fashions of the ’20s, the peculiar moral habits our grandparents.

We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are connected into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

-Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V (p. 198, Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)