Bad Things Happening. We should all aspire to be or, if this is not possible, otherwise partake of Umberto Eco. Eco s prose embodies the rationality and lushness of the Western Tradition. But Foucault s Pendulum is about the allure of crackpot thought, the razor s edge of rationality where reason vies with desire for things to be a certain way. It is a testament to Eco s obvious love for the Tradition that restrained reason, humanism, even truth, come out on top, though just barely.
Truth leads to revelation, which leads to pain.
These entities exude such patent and palpable menace that their threat is effectively neutralized by their visibility. The US Postal Service, with its near monopoly on the correspondence of millions of Americans is surely an institution that is in pawn to the devil. The Crying of Lot 49 defies categorization as a conspiracy story, since Thomas Pynchon isn t one for unified themes or focussed prose. There is a conspiracy of sorts that appears to encompass the whole of the book s bizzarre events, involving a secretive, alternate, underground postal system called Tristero , but the real claim to a conspiracy vibe lies in Pynchon s mystical linking of surreal, magical realist incidents into a conspiracy of happenstance. The fish-eyed camera lens in the book is Oedipa Maas, who has been made executrix of an estate whose contents are a mystery.