I’ve been making my way (slowly) through Pynchon’s Against The Day and thought this passage was a riot:

“Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy; your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin – all these for the devout Manichaean are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness.”

“But it’s everything that matters,” protested Chick Counterfly.

“And a true follower of this faith had to give it all up.  No sex, not even marriage; no children, no family ties.  These being only tricks of the Darkness, there to distract us from seeking union with the Light.”

“That’s the choice?  Light or pussy? What kind of choice is that?”

“Suckling!”

“Sorry Lindsay, I meant ‘vagina’, of course!”

ROFL

I’m in the middle of reading Against the Day, by Thomas  Pynchon, and I’m enjoying the expansive, wild, diverse set of characters Pynchon has created for his novel.  In particular, being now and forever a sucker for a love story, I lapped up the tale of Merle Rideout and Erlys Snidell.

Merle Rideout is a photographer, a perpetrator (and victim) of a crime that he can’t remember, ostracized from the community, facing

deputies with court orders way before breakfast, patent lawyers, vigilantes with shotguns, and worst of all those town lades, herds o’ locusts, no end to ‘em.  Torchlight rallies waving signs on sticks, ‘Beast without Shame’.. so forth.

[…] It was exactly in this blessed lull in the daily discombobulation that Merle met Erlys Mills Snidell, and found himself unexpectedly miles up some unfamiliar road, as if in the dark he had encountered an unmapped fork. […] “The Aether might have been an open question,” he told Dally, years later, “but there was never no doubt about that Erlys.”

Later, Merle’s daughter Dahlia (Dally) asks about her mother:

“And, so, what first attracted you to her?”

“Didn’t run away screaming when I told her how I felt.”

“Love at first sight, something like that?”

“Figured there was no point in trying to hide it.  Minute and a half longer, she’d have figured it out anyway.”

After a few years facing the hardships of the day with Merle, Erlys takes off with a traveling magician, Luca Zomboni, the “evil interloper”, leaving Merle with their baby daughter Dahlia.

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 he, taking care or 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 Erl 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 contour of the chore of the moment, life with young Dahlia would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or otherwise.

Doesn’t it just break your heart?

Many years later, Merle comes across a magazine article featuring Luca Zomboni, and there are pictures of Zomboni with Erlys.

Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was way beyond all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she had loved him sloughed away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had no more been ‘his’ than the unfortunate Bert Snidell’s, and that to persist in that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.

I love two things about the story of Merle and Erlys: first, the purity of Merle’s love for her, from the very first time he set eyes on her.  Second, the arc of the emotional response that Merle has – from rose-colored-glasses love at first sight, to day-to-day living and loving, to pain and anguish when she leaves, to bitterness, to a final acceptance about their relationship.  Has Merle come full circle?  Perhaps.  I’m only a quarter of the way through the novel, so there could be more to the story, but Pynchon has so many characters thrown in to the mix that I’m not even sure Erlys will make a second appearance, let alone try to predict how it might turn out for good old Merle.