Fin’s Reviews > Mason & Dixon > Status Update

In an ordinary dream, Rebekah appears. "No need to feel pleas'd with yourself. What you found was not their sacred Well, but only a Representation of it." He wakes up into a midnight sadness, trying to say, I have tasted it, yet he has not tasted it. Now he is afraid ever to, lest his Spring be discover'd as soil'd as the Holy Wells of Gloucestershire, and therefore the Krees, and therefore his Dreams.

Had a big break from this bc of work stuff. thank god im back though. Every page has something crazy- case in point (spoken by a native):

'Those of us who knew how, have fled into Refuge in your Dreams, at last. Tho' we now pursue real lives no different at their Heart from yours, we are also your Dreams.'

This book is always haunted by possibilities and other paths, paths a nascent America sadly did not take.

Loving the Black Dogs, Mechanical Ducks, and giant revolutionary Golems - but more than that loving how much this is an eighteenth century novel that includes a real panorama of class and race so clearly and fully. Not only exposes some of the horror of the times with real clarity, but then also paradoxically shows all of the weird and wonderful parts of history left for forgotten - aka Pynchon's chief project

"As to journey west... in the same sense as the Sun, is to live, raise Children, grow older, and die, carried along by the Stream of the Day,— whilst to turn Eastward, is somehow to resist time and age, to work against the Wind, seek ever tue dawn, even, as who can say, defy Death."

...I read, sitting in a teahouse in Suzhou, avoiding making a decision about my future lol

"...believe in what haunts these shores exactly to the Atom,— ghosts ev'rywhere...,— a Reservoir of Sin, whose Weight, like that of the atmosphere, is borne day after day unnotic'd, adverted to only when some Vacuum is encounter'd,— a Stranger in Town, a Malay publickly distraught, an hour at the Lodge,— into which its Contents might rush with a Turbulence felt and wonder'd at by all."