ATD 557-587

Page 566

This passage, describing Kit's dream of Umeki and the message it conveys, pulls together many of the main themes of Against the Day, tying things together in a way that Pynchon seldom does, almost as if he's providing a rather large piece of the puzzle to help the reader understand the novel:

"Deep among the equations describing the behavor of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an intinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety.... Within the mirror, with the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark intinerary, the corrupted pilgrim's guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist."