"'The basic problem,' he proposes, 'has always been getting other people to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his life? That's where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was not used as an opiate so much as a technique--it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death'" (715).

I thought this passage was really interesting, especially considering its proximity to the end of the novel. First, the notion of religion being about death really struck me. I guess I've always considered religion to be about life--the conduct of people and that type of thing. Some religions are even focus on the lives of certain figures. But religions do tend to emphasize what happens after life too, I guess. And many religions do celebrate martyrdom. The last part of the passage, I think, is quite accurate and well-written.

I'm going to try out my close reading skills (that I'm not particularly confident about) here with a passage that particularly stuck me in the last section we read:

"Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide though the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It's a floating celebration no one's thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?"(613).

It's interesting that of the four things that Pynchon mentions at the beginning of this excerpt, perfume and smoke are what I think of as vaporous. I suppose that perfume can be a liquid before sprayed, but in a party setting, I'd consider it a vapor drifting off a woman. Alcohol and sweat are, in "natural" form I suppose, liquids, although both can take on vaporous qualities. All of these things that are gliding through the house are thus mutable. But none of them can be felt or seen-- thus can they be smelled?

"It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here" (512). I laughed when I read this--it seems to sum up my thoughts about the novel in general pretty well.

I thought the differences in tone between the two scenes when Slothrop falls into the water were really interesting. The first time, Pynchon writes that "Slothrop dithers, goes to follow her--at the last moment some joker pulls the ladder up and the boat moves away, Slothrop screams, loses his balance and falls into the river"(467). This scene (although I'm sure not amusing for Slothrop) struck me as really humorous for some reason. Maybe it's Pynchon's use of the word "joker," or maybe it's the manner in which he fell, but I saw a decisive tone of amusement throughout that passage.

While finishing up this last section, I came across a few lines that made me pause for a moment over them. One page 396, Pynchon writes, "It's sad, though. Tchitcherine likes Slothrop. He feels that, in any normal period of history, they could easily be friends. People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre--not to mention the personality disorder--that he admires."

I think the most interesting aspect of these lines was Pynchon's use of the word "normal." A normal period of history. At first, I focused too much on the word "normal" alone, asking all those typical questions like "what does normal really mean?" and "who is Pynchon to decide what's normal and not?" (Although I suppose, as the author, he has every right to do so. But oh well.) But then I focused more on the "normal period of history," thinking of the absolute craziness that all these characters have been encountering in what Pynchon seems to classify as a "not-normal period of history." And, while I started out as indignant at the classifying of history based on the word "normal," I finally realized that Pynchon makes a pretty good case for it with the rest of his novel.

The other day, in my Intro to Statistics class, my professor introduced a series of equations to us. And one of them happened to be the Poisson equation. Pynchon's definition fits pretty well with the definition my professor gave us (I was actually a bit disappointed--it would be interesting, but I suppose highly unlikely, to catch Pynchon in a mistake). Anyways. I thought it was pretty cool to see a link between a literature class and a math class--I don't get those very often.

On page 307, Pynchon mentions "Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own." This really resonated with me, for some reason.

Much to my relief, I found that these next 100 pages went a lot more smoothly than did the previous 150. I feel like I understood a lot more of what happened; somehow it seems that Pynchon's writing style became easier to understand once the action left England (at the beginning of part 2). And maybe that's some sort of a theme--in war-confused England, the writing is very stream-of-conscious and difficult; in the sunny Riviera, the writing is more simplistic and easy to follow.

I thought it was really interesting that, after our discussion about cause and effect in class yesterday, there was a brief mention of cause and effect in the novel.

I had a hard time with these first 150 pages in many respects. First, they just took so long to read! I also struggled with comprehension at points, especially with Pynchon's "stream-of-conscious"-style writing. It's also hard for me to believe that there are still 600 or so pages left in the book. I feel like I should be near the middle, as opposed to really just starting out.

One element that I noticed fairly early on was Pynchon's concentration on forms of light. It seems as though once a page or so Pynchon mentions the color, or the intensity, or the effect of, or the lack of light. Some of the imagery that comes from his descriptions of light is really cool; my favorite was "Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang out from under the fancy iron eaves, unlit for centuries"(4).("Unlit for centuries" was the part that got me hooked; it's interesting to think that the last people to light the lamps were long dead at that point in the narration.)