the object in its Journey, comes nigh, among the excursions of Chance, the sins of ministers, the inscriptions upon walls of Gate-posts, -- the birth of the 'Sandwhich' at this exact moment in Christianity,-- one of the Noble and Fallen for its Angel! Disks of secular Bread, --enclosing whilst concealing slices of real Flesh, yet a-sop with Blood, under the earthly guise of British Beef, all,-- but for the Species of course,--Consubstantiate, thus...the Sandwhich, Eucharist of this our Age.
- From Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
The above was a summer spent reading when I should have been tending to more important things, but either way, I get easily distracted by dense, very possibly crackpot writing, and I had this strange, elusive piece as a part of my FB profile for the longest time, unable to take it down due to a fascination with it that I can't quite put my finger on.
I'm intrigued by theology, by belief systems as they affect society, both the good and bad effects those may be (I find it more enlightening to focus on the good things, since we've been dealing too heavily with the results of bad theology in recent years). I find as much good in Religious belief as most Agnostics find bad, which is a turnaround from the cranky Atheist I left behind from my teen years.
Most of all, I kept the quote up for two years because I love language that can find meter, humor and a wily confusion in anything religious, and seriously, have you picked up a copy of Mason & Dixon? It's like 7,000 pages the fuck long and I'll never find that quote again. Yeesh. Gotta save it somewhere.
2 comments:
didn't pynchon write his own dictionary or something? called it 'the obtuseary' i think.
Yeah, and there's only one copy, hidden deep beneath the Washington Monument, next to that Aztec temple they put there.
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