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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the loss of an ideal vision of a city and how its inhabitants disconnect from their past traumas.
In this quote, Thomas Pynchon explores the idea that a city can symbolize a collective loss of innocence, not in a straightforward sense, but rather as a representation of dashed hopes and dreams about what an urban environment could ideally offer. The inhabitants, who are described as embittered and suffering from amnesia, struggle to confront their shared painful history and are disconnected from the memory of their trauma, making it difficult for them to heal or restore their vision of a better city.
In practice
In a discussion about urban decay and lost potential during a community meeting.
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.
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.
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.
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.
Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?
It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.
Life off Earth is in two important respects not at all unworldly: you can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones.
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