My belief is that "recluse" is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, "doesn't like to talk to reporters."
Interpretation
Pynchon's quote suggests that the term 'recluse' is often misused by the media to label individuals who prefer privacy.
In this quote, Thomas Pynchon critiques the way journalists label individuals as 'recluses' simply because they choose not to engage with the media. This reflects a broader commentary on how language can shape perceptions and misrepresent people's true nature or preferences. It underscores the idea that individuals may have legitimate reasons for their privacy that are overlooked or mischaracterized by society and the press.
In practice
During a panel discussion on media ethics, one might quote Pynchon to highlight the responsibility journalists have in accurately representing individuals.
But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.
It is the distinguishing glory of Christianity not to rest satisfied with superficial appearances, but to rectify the motives, and purify the heart.
It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.
By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.
[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you.
Having, First, gained all you can, and, Secondly saved all you can, Then give all you can.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.