PROBABILITY

How many ways can you organize 40 characters, the length of the first sentence in *A Tale of Two Cities*? Well, if 10! is comes out to 3.6 million, then I imagine that 40! is not just geometrically or exponentially larger, but tetranentially greater.

RETURNING TO THE HEXAGON FROM WHICH WE WERE BORN

*Como todos los hombres de la Biblioteca, he viajado en mi juventud; he peregrinado en busca de un libro, acaso del catálogo de catálogos; ahora que mis ojos casi no pueden descifrar lo que escribo, me preparo a morir a unas pocas leguas del hexágono en que nací.*

TRANSLATION: Like all from the Library, I traveled in my youth, making a pilgrimage in search of a book, perhaps to be found in the catalog of catalogs; now my eyes can barely decipher what I write, and I prepare myself for death only a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.

INTERPRETATION: Lovers of books, the heroes of this, our time and this, our society, are born intellectually and thus do they expire.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE LONG READS
Gogol's *Dead Souls*
Lermontov, *A Hero of Our Time*
de Beauvoir's *She Came to Stay*
Solzhenitsyn's *A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch*
Oakley Hall's *Warlock*

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE SHORT READS
Conrad "Secret Sharer"
Book of Exodus
Gogol's "Overcoat"
Poetry of Diane Seuss
Borges, essays from *A Universal History of Infamy*

KANT ON CAMUS

Kant clearly anticipated Clamence. Here's his assessment from the *Critique of Judgment*:

*But that the existence of a human being who lives merely for enjoyment . . . should have a value in itself, even if as a means to this he was as helpful as possible to others . . . of this reason could never be persuaded. Only through that which he does without regard to enjoyment, in full freedom and independently of that which nature could passively provide for him, does he give his being as the existence of a person an absolute value; and happiness, in all the fullness of its agreeableness, is far from being an unconditional good*

BUBLICAL HERMENEUTICS

Oldest surviving sources of the Book of Esther are from the Ancient Greek Septuagint (LXX) and the Alpha Text (AT). In the fourth century AD, Jerome created a version of the Bible for people who spoke and read in the common Latin tongue, the Vulgate. Unlike us, he had access to both early Greek and Hebrew sources and noticed that the Greek versions included more sections than the Hebrew. It appeared that the Ancient Greeks had padded the Bible for whatever reason, so he decided to omit the extra passages from the Vulgate.

Still later in the Middle Ages, Jewish scholars re-created the Hebrew text, aka the Masoretic text or the MT, and later Protestant texts would be based on this. Whatever translation of the Bible you're using , it's likely to be much shorter than our oldest surviving sources--the LXX and the AT.

**READ FOR NEXT TIME**

Short - *Book of Esther*
Long - first section of Pynchon's *Gravity's Rainbow*

QUOTABLE PYNCHON

Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees. (33)

. . . the thousand dodgy . . . surveillance schemes that have sprung up . . . since the Americans and a dozen governments in exile moved in. In which the German curiously fades into a irrelevance. Everyone watching over his shoulders, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors . . . communists drawing beads on . . . shadow ministers, ELAS Greeks stocking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in. . . (35).

. . . he took the envelope, averted? eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer's reflex. . . more wholesome than anything this war's ever photographed. . . life, at least. . . (35)

CAN WE ALL AGREE THAT THE NOVEL (ANY NOVEL) IS BEAUTIFUL?

When it comes to judgments about what we find agreeable, e.g., "This wine tastes good," other persons would be correct if they insist that what I really mean is "This wine tastes good to me." In matters of sensual taste, everybody has their own, but it would be absurd to say of "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,"This poem is beautiful to me." With regard to beauty, everyone does not have their own special taste, and to assert otherwise would be tantamount to denying the existence of taste. Now to be sure, one may often find in a social environment a consensus approaching universality about judgments of taste such as, "no one ought to drink rye whiskey neat," but this is a general empirical observation, i.e., "no one that knows anything about whiskey would drink it in such a way."

CRYPTIC OPENING SENTENCES

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, there is nothing to compare it to now. It is too late. The Ecacuation still proceeds, but it's all theater."

But clearly it's not too late because Prentice Pirate, the character we begin with in the opening paragraph, does make it back to the barracks to make banana breakfast for everyone. So what does Pynchon mean when he says it's too late when Pirate is obviously able to evacuate?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE EPIC READS

Satre, *Being and Nothingness*
Solzhenitsyn's *Gulag Archipelego*
Wagner's Ring Cycle
Hofstadter's *Gödel, Escher, Bach*
*Finnegan's Wake*

Petaluma ST6, a local paraliterary cell

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