Of course there is no accounting for taste, and mine is made by privileges, biases, markets, algorithms, and countless other invisible social constructions, but oh, oh, dang, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is one unbelievable U.S. novel—beautiful, horrifying, critical, subversive, double-voiced, heteroglossic, mind-altering, vivifying, singularly funny.

A weird minor history. I read Mason & Dixon in 1998 on borrow from the Brooklyn Library, a darkish period where I was slowly, even painfully, returning to the the practice of reading after its long woeful absence (my worst, most selfish, self-involved, and destructive periods have also been those I was not reading, or reading far too little, or within winnowed frame of reference). I know I enjoyed and was moved by the novel because I do remember, upon finishing it, weeping in the small apartment I then shared with my sister. But, fast forward 20 years later, I just re-read the book over many weeks and made a shocking realization: I remembered nothing of detail from that first read. Nothing save a vague approximation of the novel's final lines. And though I thought myself even then someone who knew something, I see now that after that first 20-odd years of so-called schooling I had no grasp whatsoever of anything vital—history, philosophy, science, art, literature or whatever—truly anything beyond me-producing consumer culture, especially and most importantly magic, the suprarenal, the unsaid and unknown, others and others and others. Re-reading Mason & Dixon, which demanded I read a whole network of other texts in the process, helped me appreciate that I I have come a little way, very little on sum, but that I yet have universes and universes to inquire.

Here's to patience, focus, endurance. To read, learn,  breathe, be at length. Of and alongside others.

Crying again.