Chapter 16: 167-174

Page 171

country wife, city wife
Pynchon's life values in evidence? He dislikes cities, seen elsewhere.

Bread & Wine, a kindness of the Almighty
Pynchon seeing the Eucharist as a 'kind' way of enacting the body and blood of Christ belief in Christianity. A wonderful trope.

Death or its ev'ryday Coercions...Death's thousand Metaphors
See this theme in Against the Day; all of the day's necessities that are against the simple living of life...all that is "against the day".

Page 172

acted as a Lens, a moral refraction
Once again, light as metaphor, lenses and refraction ala ATD.

see them as they are
Only in death..in life, M & D and everyone struggles to see the heavenly bodies clearly. Nice.

Telluric secrets
telluric adj. Of or relating to Earth; terrestrial. Derived from or containing tellurium, especially with valence 6.

PaGE 173

Bradley's Metaphor
Bradley, Dr. James (1693-1762) Astronomer Royal at the time a request for an English surveying team to determine the Pennsylvania/Maryland border was made. Bradley was the director of the the Greenwich Observatory. He recommended Charles Mason who had been his assistant observer from 1756 to 1760, working closely with Bradley on a catalogue of positions of the moon. In 1729 he published his discovery of the aberration of light, providing the first observational proof of the Copernican hypothesis that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice versa.

Canary Coat
"His yellow jacket with red sleeves indicates that he is a 'canary', temporarily forced to wear this distinctive coat as a defaulter against Hospital rules (often for drunkenness).... the infliction of the 'canary' coat on pensioners as a punishment was abolished by Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, during his Governorship of the Hospital in the 1830s."