Mason & Dixon

This was my last unread Pynchon novel. To very simply place it within my own hierarchy of his novels, Mason & Dixon is better than Vineland, Inherent Vice, and The Crying of Lot 49 but not as good as Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day, and V.

I can't bring myself to say anything more coherent than that at this time, so instead here are some excerpts:

” ... Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, – who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.”

“‘What Machine is it,' young Cherrycoke later bade himself goodnight, ‘that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro' another Day, – another Year, – as thro' an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight ... we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Clarets, – we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop ... gather'd dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver, ... no Horses, ... only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity ....'“

“The Line makes itself felt, – thro' some Energy unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near. In the Dark, one never knows. Of course I am seeking the Warrior Path, imagining myself an heroick Scout. We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else, – sound, sky, vegetation, – may have announced it. Perhaps ‘tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium, – does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have Mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, not is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction.”

“‘Once the solar parallax is known,' they told me, ‘once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to seek another Space.' No one explain'd what that meant, however ...? ‘Perhaps some of us will try living upon thy own Surface. I am not sure that everyone can adjust from a concave space to a convex one. Here have we been sheltered, nearly everywhere we look is no Sky, but only more Earth. – How many of us, I wonder, could live the other way, the way you People do, so exposed to the Outer Darkness? Those terrible Lights, great and small? And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slight pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice. Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else, – ev'rybody's axes converge, – forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,– an entirely different set of rules for how to behave.'”