Mason & Dixon

On the return flight from Taiwan I finally had the chance to finish the Thomas Pynchon novel Mason & Dixon, a feat made possible by neglecting the assigned reading for Economics for Managers.

For those with an abundance of internet-surfing time on their hands due to the break in NCAA basketball, here are a few short excerpts I enjoyed:

Maskelyne laments his 29th birthday:
"Twenty-nine's Fell Shadow! O, inhospitably final year of any Pretense to Youth, its Dreams now, how wither'd away...tho' styl'd a Prime, yet bid'st thou Adieu to the Prime of Life!...There,- there, in the Stygian Mists of Futurity, loometh the dread Thirty,- Transition unspeakable! Prime so soon fallen, thy Virtue so easily broken, into a Number divisible, - penetrable!- by six others!'

A discussion of ladies clothing:
It is difficult, in these days of closer-fitting Attire, to imagine the enormous volumes of unoccupied Space that once lay between a Skirt's outer Envelope, and the woman's body far within. "Why, there may be anything!" Capt. Dasp as if genuinely alarmed, "stash'd in there,- contraband Tea, the fruits of Espionage, the coded fates of Nations, a moderate-sized Lover, a Bomb."
"Yet the present-day bodice," remarks Lady Lepton, "can conceal secrets only with difficulty. A single key, perhaps, or the briefest of love-notes. Indeed, 'tis but an ephemeral Surface, rising out of the Spaces that billow ambiguously below the waist, till above melting...here, into the bare decolletage, producing an effect, do you mark, of someone trying to ascend into her natural undraped State, out of a Chrysalis spun of the same invisible Silk as the Social Web, kept from emerging into her true wing'd Self,- perhaps then to fly away,- by the gravity of her gown."

Dixon senses the East India Company afoot, and traps Mason in a pun:
"Come, Sir, can you not sense here, there, just 'round the corner, the pattering feet and swift Hands of John Company, the Lanthorns of the East..." the scent of fresh Coriander, the whisper of a Sarong...?"
"Sari," corrects Mason.
"Not at all Sir,- 'twas I who was sarong."

A being from inside the hollow-earth contemplates life on the surface to Dixon:
"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 slightly 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."

Mason writes his own epitaph:
He wish'd but for a middling Life,
Forever in betwixt
The claims of Lust and Duty,
So intricately mix'd,-
To reach some happy Medium,
Fleet as a golden Beam,
Uncharted as St. Brendan's Isle
Fugitive as a Dream.

Alas, 'twas not so much the Years,
As Day by thieving Day,-
With Debts incurr'd, and Interest Due,
That Dreams were sold to pay,-
Until at last, but one remain'd,
Too modest to have Worth,
That yet he holds within his heart,
As he is held, in Earth.


I reckon that's enough of that. Time to get some sleep.