"Advent Blows from the Sea…"
I was asked to present a Christmas reading for the English Department Honors Society on Friday. I remembered a section of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that I found particularly poetic and moving. The scene is about (at least as far as I can tell), the frenzied collision between the spirit of war and the spirit of Christmas, and how each is its own variation on the theme of entropy. This is a fancy way of saying that each “spirit” has its own story about destruction and recreation, about hope and sorrow. Pynchon puts them to work during the Advent season of 1944 in his masterpiece, and I find the passage here from 131-134 in the Google Books version stirring, though many I shared it with seemed more mystified than anything else. I convinced myself the passage means enough to me that it was worth risking obtuseness for the spirit of genuine sharing, but the spirit of sharing is its own package of themes of concerns for old and new as well, and I’m not sure it was a wise choice in the end.
How did you embed a section of a book into a blog post? Is that a new Google Books trick?
…Man, I don’t even remember this particular passage, but it is a good one. What an amazing book.
yup. Google Books plus AJAX. Be prepared for more of this trick in the future.
this is incredible. Could you comment on what particular passages stood out to you, and what they meant in that context?