copied from goodreads

I’m gonna write too much about this book. I can feel it.

This book is about lines.

Pynchon is not just a scientist. If that’s all he cared about I’m sure he would’ve been fine staying at Boeing. But of course he is more than that. He is a philosopher and a historian and maybe most importantly a bit of a Luddite. He’s the rare kind of scientist that has the chops to tell you what and how but also at the end of the day ask “why?”This book is an ephemeral “why” thrown directly into the face of the raging white hot Eurus-borne Enlightenment line emblazoned into America by its colonial origins.The titular duo are often presented asking some of the same questions that Pynchon would have as he found himself steeped in the United States’ war machine under the auspices of “science”. They find themselves witnessing slavery at horrific scale in an effort to propagate…what? Democratic ideals? Perhaps in some capacity but much like we see today those ideals are so easily wrapped around the selfish needs of their financiers.One could argue that much of our drive as a species in its efforts to carve some meaning out of the universe amount merely to lines. It’s no coincidence that this novel’s fits half focuses on Mason and Dixon’s contributions to the Transit of Venus observations of the 18th century, precipitated by Edmund Haley’s calculations and predictions of the Transit’s next occurrence. The summary of this observation’s significance both in our scientific history and the imagery of this novel is that with the use of two symmetrical observation lines we were capable of knowing the size of our solar system. To draw lines marking our territory in the universe.But at what cost?The cost of science in our view of the world is a central theme for Pynchon. One which he revolves about like a chaotic system’s strange attractor. His books come back to fairy tales, myths, folklore, and the collective stories that we were allowed to tell ourselves before the rending force of the Enlightenment cordoned all of that off forever. Pynchon in many ways describes the lost invisible immanence of the world before we attempted to divide it into neat squares with the power of science’s powerful ability to draw lines.And in a world being divided more and more into neat squares and polygons Pynchon runs riot (or amok if you’re a lost sailor for the VOC, look it up) by adding in new shapes. Like a toddler with a crayon on a pristine wall he says “what if we draw some hatch marks perpendicular to it” (Ogham Celtic writing and its revolutionary stance against British colonial conquest). “What if we draw some spirals around it?” (Inductors in a linear circuit perhaps? Accelerating progress even further? Or perhaps an elongation of time with new orthogonal directions to travel outside of what we know as time? Or else burial mounds in prehistoric America shaped by a force older than the native people of this land? Or maybe again the Celts had this one locked in at Newgrange as they traced spirals onto their astronomical monoliths?)In any account this book is an attempt to hold a sliver of pre-Enlightenment thought into a carbonized slate of amber and allow us to inspect it and compare it with what we know today. It takes a true genius to be able to do something like that against the torrential wave of Enlightenment thought that has come to shape our world. And by God, to have done it while staying so funny and tragic and emotionally relevant.Ultimately maybe this novel is about how having a friend is the only true way to scan out a Keplerian segment of our universe and understand it. By that true symmetrical parallax we can truly see where we stand amidst the chaos.See, I told you.