Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the complex and often artificial nature of urban environments in California.
In this quote, Thomas Pynchon reflects on the fragmented and conceptual nature of urban development in California, suggesting that what we perceive as cities are often merely collections of bureaucratic divisions and infrastructure rather than cohesive, identifiable communities. This observation speaks to the disconnection and artificiality of modern life, where human experiences are overshadowed by administrative and financial considerations.
In practice
In a discussion about urban planning, this quote could illustrate the complexities of city design.
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.
A fly is as untamable as a hyena.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Christians, in particular, realize that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith.
The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.
Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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