An Unlikely Sage

[Martin Bailey]

Here's diary entry from Pete which I managed to copy before his site went
down.

-MB

 28 January 2007
An Unlikely Sage


I read a lot. The new book by Thomas Pynchon (he of 'V' and 'Gravity's
Rainbow') is 'Against The Day'. It has been reviewed as a very thick book,
it has over one thousand pages. Yet as soon as I began to read I knew I was
happily hooked for the entire journey. It reads like a boy's adventure novel
from the fifties, with touches of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon) and
Tanglewreck (Jeanette Winterson). Last night, suddenly out of a tumbling
spill of images, emerged a paragraph of a single sentence that seems to me
of the most extraordinary wisdom and insight. Merle is a single father
waiting for the return of Erlys, his baby daughter Dahlia's errant mother.


Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long as he could, waited for mail, a
telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in from the winter skies, and
in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all be, taking care of
this baby here, long as he didn't fret about the time or any need he
might've thought he had to get on with some larger plan–with Erlys gone,
anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike anyway–and that
long as he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just staying within the
contours of the chore of the moment, life with young Dahlia would provide
precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or otherwise.


Almost Bhuddist.