23. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 733-773

Three: Last Transit, 75-78

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Mason writes Dixon to tell him, "I am coming North a Mountain of suitable Gravity to seek, whose presum'd Influence might deflect a Plumb-line clearly enough to be measur'd without Ambiguity," adding a little dig about Maskelyne's "difficult History with Plumb-lines." He asks Dixon to recommend an inn, but Dixon insists that Mason stay with him.

"Mason finds Dixon still gloomy about the death of his Mother back in January," but they begin to reminisce. Mason tells him about how Maskelyne kept him on in Ulster longer than necessary and then brought him home on "a meat-ship" -- a vessel loaded with sheep carcasses. Eventually there comes a moment of unaccustomed tenderness between the old companions:

"Gave thee a rough time, didn't I, Friend." Reaching to rest his hand for a moment upon Dixon's Shoulder, before removing it again.
"Oh," Dixon nodding away at an Angle from any direct view of his Partner's Face, "as rough times go, ... the French were worse ...? The five Years of Mosquitoes, of course ..." The old Astronomers sit for a while in what might be called an Embrace, but that they forbear to touch. 

Dixon launches into an account of his stay at the North Cape of Norway, where he caught only glimpses of the transit. And then proceeds into a tall tale about his travels even further north, but to the inside of the world, where one of the inhabitants observes that people on the outside of the globe, "wherever you may stand, given the Convextity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice. Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else, -- ev'rybody's axes converge, -- forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another, -- an entirely different set of rules for how to behave." Mason has his usual bemused reaction to Dixon's fabulations.

As they part, Mason asks, "If they don't kill and eat me up there, shall we do this again." Dixon replies, "We must count upon becoming old Geezers together." "They are looking directly at each other for the first time since either can remember."

In Scotland, in August 1773, Mason meets up with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, who are "upon their famous Trip to the Hebrides," or so Cherrycoke claims, though Ives doubts that they passed within a hundred miles of each other. "'I had my Boswell, once,' Mason tells Boswell, 'Dixon and I. We had a joint Boswell. Preacher nam'd Cherrycoke. Scribbling ev'rything down, just like you, Sir.'" On his expedition, Mason locates the mountain called Schiehallion, but he declines to return to the mountain to make the measurements needed, so Maskelyne gets the credit for determining the mass of the Earth.

When Mason and Dixon meet again, Dixon is crippled by gout and Mason has rediscovered his old melancholy. They spend their time together fishing. Mason meets Dixon's mistress, Margaret Bland, whom he has always planned to marry "just before we go to America." They have two daughters, but "America now would never be more real than his Remembrance, which he must now take possession of, in whatever broken incompleteness, or lose forever." Mason tells Dixon that he has remarried and they have had a child, Charles Jr., and are expecting another.

While they are fishing one night, they're approached by a dog, a Norfolk terrier, who looks like the Learnèd Dog, though that was many years ago and this dog is "scarcely a year old." The dog follows them home, but never speaks. Margaret Bland asks what his name is. "'Fang,' says Mason. 'Learnèd,' says Dixon." Then one night, both of them have the same dream: The dog whispers to them, "I am a British Dog, and belong to no one, if not to the two of you. The next time you are together, so shall I be, with you." They take it as a sign that they'll see the dog when they get together next year.

But it is Mason, not Dixon, who emigrates to America, where Benjamin Franklin visits him on his deathbed. "His illness at the end was never stipulated. Yet 'tis possible, after all, down here, to die of Melancholy." Though he had five more boys and a girl, "he never put Rebekah to Earth." And he never really reconciled with his father, who claimed that Mason's son Doctor Isaac "was named after the Doctor who lost" Rebekah. Willy Mason tells his brother, "You are nam'd for Newton, whom Dad admires greatly," but Doctor Isaac remains unsure.

"When news reach'd Mason that Dixon had died, he went about for the rest of the Day as if himself stricken." He tells his sons stories about Dixon, and when he mentions Dixon's two daughters, Willy and Doc suspect him of matchmaking: "'Two Sons.... Two Daughters. And a Father wishing, as Fathers do, to be a Grand-Father." With Doc, Mason visits Dixon's grave, where "Mason beseech'd what dismally little he knew of God, to help Dixon through." When he is suddenly overcome, "'It's your Mate,' Doctor Isaac assur'd him, 'It's what happens when your Mate dies.'"

On his deathbed, Mason says to Franklin, "Sir, you have encounter'd Deists before, and know that our Bible is Nature, wherein the Pentateuch, is the Sky. I have found there, written ev'ry Night, in Astral Gematria, Messages of Great Urgency to ourTime, and to your Continent, Sir."

After Mason's death, "Mary would return to England with the younger Children, -- William and Dr. Isaac, Rebekah's Sons, would stay, and be Americans."

22. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 687-732

Two: America, 71-73; Three: Last Transit, 74

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The surveying done, they turn to putting things on paper, including the map-making, which is Dixon's job. When he's done with that, "Mason eagerly rushes to inspect the Map of the Boundaries, almost instantly boggling, for there bold as a Pirate's Flag is an eight-pointed Star, surmounted by a Fleur-de-Lis," the symbol of, as Mason puts it, "England's most inveterately hated Rival ... France." But Dixon explains that "A Surveyor's North-Point, ... by long Tradition, is his own, which he may draw, and embellish, in any way he pleases, so it point where North by." This is his own, "his Hall-Mark," "an ancient Shape." Mason is concerned that "some, finding it upon a new Map, might also take it as a reassertion of French claims to Ohio." And though they bicker as usual for a while,

Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch'd with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev'ry place they ran it, ev'ry House pass'd by, Road cross'd, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev'rywhere, and the Dragon nearly visible.... "This is beauteous Work. Emerson was right, Jeremiah. You were flying all the time."

But they still have some survey work to do in "the cheerless Bogs of Delaware," which takes them almost another year. Zhang still hangs around complaining about sha. And at one point Dixon reflects on what all their travels together have in common: "Slaves. Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces, -- more of it at St. Helena, -- and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to re-encounter thro' the World this public secret, this shameful Core."

At the end of June, when they finish their measuring, they go south to Baltimore, "and the moment when Dixon will accost the Slave-Driver in the Street, and originate the family story whose material Focus, for years among the bric-a-brac in Hull, will be the Driver's Lash, that Uncle Jeremiah took away from the Scoundrel." It is an act that earns Mason's often-withheld admiration. And it brings into focus another theme of the novel:

Having acknowledg'd at the Warpath the Justice of the Indians' Desires, after the two deaths, Mason and Dixon understand as well that the Line is exactly what Capt. Zhang and a number of others have been styling it all along -- a conduit for Evil. 

One night, as he is walking along the Visto, Mason sees Rebekah's ghost, urging him to "come back to our Vale.... You must leave Mr. Dixon to his Fate, and attend your own.... You ... must go back inside the House of your Duty. When you come out again, he will no longer be there, and the Dark will be falling." On Sept. 11, 1768, they sail for England.

There follows a fantasy about Mason and Dixon journeying together, westward beyond the Ohio. "Betwixt themselves, neither feels British enough anymore, nor quite American, for either Side of the Ocean. They are content to reside like Ferrymen or Bridge-keepers, ever in a Ubiquity of Flow, before a ceaseless Spectacle of Transition."

But in fact, they return to England and a meeting of the Royal Society Council in December 1768. The next transit of Venus is ahead, and the records of the meeting show that Dixon says he's "willing to go to the North Cape or Cherry Island; Mr Mason rather declined going; but added, that if he was wanted, he should be ready to go." As they leave the meeting, they are pursued by "Some horrible Boswell," who points out, "neither of you has been voted to membership in the Royal Society. Mr. Mason, we've heard you're the one here who's unhappy with that, whilst Mr. Dixon takes the more philosophickal View." Dixon replies, "Only the long view, Lad."

The truth is that Mason is feeling guilty about leaving his family, and especially about his father's criticism. "So he declines the North Cape, and another posting together, symmetrically as ever, to that end of the world lying opposite their first end of the World. 'Someone must break this damn'd Symmetry,' Mason mutters." He goes to observe the transit in South Ulster instead, but sees only "the ingress of Venus upon the Disk of the Sun, but not her departure." Ireland reminds him of America, "frontier Country," and he has a bad dream of Rebekah.

He returns with his report to Maskelyne, who annoys him with the alterations he has made to the office that used to belong to Mason's patron, Bradley, and his flaunting of his relationship to Clive of India. Maskelyne is also suspected of having used his position as Royal Astronomer to have his method of measuring longitude accepted over the more accurate method using John Harrison's chronometer. Cherrycoke comments to his audience, however, that Maskelyne "did what he could to support Mason's claim to Prize money from the Board of Longitude for his Refinements to Mayer's Lunar Tables, whilst seeking none for himself."  In the end, Mason accepts a commission from Maskelyne to go to Scotland, and to visit Dixon along the way. 

7. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 183-214

One: Latitudes and Departures; 18-21

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Mason and Dixon return to London, where "They address the Council of the Royal Society, and find they have nothing but good to say of all they have met at St. Helena and the Cape." Dixon makes his way home, as does Mason, though more reluctantly: He wants to see his sons, but "he dreads the Re-Union." His son William is five, and Doctor Isaac (apparently his real name) is three. They are shy when he arrives, bringing them toy ships that he picked up at the last minute.

James Bradley, the royal astronomer to whom he was assistant, dies on the thirteenth of July, and Mason decides to go to his funeral, remembering how close -- perhaps too close? -- he and Rebekah were to Bradley and Susannah. But Bradley's family -- Susannah's brother Sam Peach and seventeen-year-old Miss Bradley -- "advise him, as gently as they've ever known how, that Bradley wish'd only the Family near." Mason feels like "a Warrior who has just lost his Lord."

Bradley married Susannah Peach in the year of a comet, 1744, and she died in 1757, "another Comet-year." Mason reflects that two years separated her death from Rebekah's and that those years "were rul'd by the Approaching Comet of Dr. Halley." Bradley's death leaves his valuable "Volume of Observations Lunar, Planetary, and Astral" in the hands of the Peach family, and Mason wonders if Susannah had been "but a means of getting those Obs into the Peach family, and the eager Mittens of Sam Peach, Sr." He wonders if, because of his contributions to them, he should put in his own claim, but decides that he had really given them to Bradley "for nothing more than, 'Thank you, Mr. Mason, and well done.'"

He goes to a bar, where he finds a heated topic, related to Bradley's death, is the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Britain, which took place in 1752 and necessitated skipping eleven days -- so that Wednesday,  Sept. 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday, Sept. 14, 1752. "Mason pretends to examine his shoe-buckle, trying not to sigh too heavily. Of the many Classics of Idiocy, this Idiocy of the Eleven Days has join'd the select handful that may never be escap'd." Mason's own father had argued with him about whether losing eleven days made one younger or older. In the pub, a Mr. Swivett is complaining, "Not only did they insult the God-given structure of the Year, they also put us on Catholic Time. French Time." For the audience in the pub, Mason crafts a fiction that the time was not lost; it was given to a race of beings with a different approach to time than ours. They continue to inhabit the lost eleven days, "and wherever they are, temporally, eleven days to the Tick behind us. 'Tis all an Eden there, Lads, and only they inhabit it, they and their Generations." And he buys everyone another round.

Mason's sons "live with their Aunt Hester, Mason's sister, and her husband, Elroy." Returning there, he is set upon by Delicia Quall, who "suffers from that uncontroll'd Need to be a Bride, known to Physicians as Nymphomania, in whose cheerful Frenzy nuances vanish, and ev'ry unattach'd man is a potential Husband." He tells them all that "there's something else up" and that he "may be off again, and fairly soon." His sister Anne, just "turn'd seventeen and eager to be out of the House, where she is an unpaid 'round-the-clock Menial" asks where he's going, and Mason says, "America." He explains, "They want Boundary-Lines, hundreds of Miles long, as perfect as they can get 'em. For that, someone must take Latitudes and Longitudes, by the Stars." Hester informs him that if he's away when the boys come of age, they'll be apprenticed to his father at the mill.

So Mason goes to see his father, who says that he told Elroy that since he's been paying for their upkeep he feels entitled to "their services, when they're old enough to work." But Mason can't tell whether his father is joking or not. Mason's father also says that when he heard of Bradley's death, he knew that Mason would be going to America. He had warned Mason that Sam Peach was not a friend of his.

"In fact, far from the Ogre or Troll his son makes him out to be, Charles Sr. is a wistful and spiritual person. He believes that bread is alive." This creeps out his son a bit:

The baker's trade terrified the young man. He learn'd as much of it as would keep him going, -- but when he began to see into it, the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the over door like a door before a Sacrament, -- the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in the Mass, -- was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ's Body could enter Bread, then what else might? -- might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome? Alone in the early empty mornings even for a few seconds with the mute white rows, he was overwhelmed by the ghostliness of Bread. 

Mason had wooed Rebekah with his own fantasies of escape from this provincial life, planning to take her with him when he went to view the transit of Venus. But he also knew that even astronomy was subject to the whims of politics. And now he meets with Maskelyne about the proposed survey in America.

6. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, pp. 158-182

One: Latitudes and Departures; 15-17

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Maskelyne now insists that he and Mason must move to the other side of the island, which is exposed "to an unremitting and much-warn'd-against Wind," because he needs to correlate readings from that side with the one from the leeward side. And in fact the windy side is so bleak that the soldiers stationed on it set up "various Suicide-Banks and Madness-Pools," and "the Post-Surgeon ... tries never to stir too far from the deepest rooms of the Fort, where the Wind may oppress him least, and is careful to include it in each daily Prayer, as if 'twere a Deity in itself, infinitely in Need, ever demanding." Maskelyne encounters there a German soldier named Dieter who "Enlisted in ignorance that anyplace like this could exist" and desperately wants to leave. Dieter, having learned that Maskelyne is Clive of India's brother-in-law, begs his help in making his escape. But Maskelyne says he can't prevail upon Clive in the matter and offers to pay the twenty pounds Dieter needs to buy his way out of his contract.

Things go badly for Mason, too: He begins seeing the ghost of his dead wife. He's afraid to tell Maskelyne who, he fears, might use it against him someday. But he's sure that once Dixon arrives, he'll tell him the whole story. He'll tell Dixon how he met Rebekah on May Day at "the annual cheese-rolling," when the Gloucester cheeses are "blessed and ritually rolled thrice 'roud the churchyard, and thence down a Hill." Except that this year someone has taken it upon himself to create a giant cheese, an "Octuple Gloucester, ... but actually octupled in all dimensions, making it more like a 512-fold or Quincentenariduodecuple Gloucester, -- running to nearly four tons in weight when green and even after shrinkage towering ten feet high." It is loaded onto a sturdy wagon for transport.

Mason has come to Randwick Church, the site of the cheese-blessing, hoping to see Susannah Peach, daughter of Samuel Peach, "a silk merchant of some repute, and a growing power within the East India Company." His infatuation is such that he has gone to her house when she wasn't there and "knelt by her Bed and press'd his face to the Counterpane of Silk to inhale what he could of her Scent." But while he is waiting, the wagon carrying the cheese breaks down and the great orange wheel starts rolling toward where Mason is standing: "The Victim of a Cheese malevolent, being his last thought before abrupt Rescue by way of a stout shove, preceded by an energetick Rustling of Taffeta. It is Rebekah, and "If she was not, like Susannah, a Classick English Rose, neither was she any rugged Blossom of the Heath."

Here Cherrycoke's audience interrupts, or rather Uncle Ives does: "There are no records of her in Gloucestershire.... Mason was baptiz'd at Sapperton Church, as were his children, -- yet he and Rebekah were not married there. So mayn't they have met elsewhere as well, even a Greenwich?"

Cherrycoke resumes his narrative, with another appearance by Rebekah's ghost to Mason in the wind. After she disappears, he is unable to sleep. Maskelyne finally awakens in the middle of the day to ask him if he had come into the tent about dawn. Mason, not willing to talk to him about his visions, denies it. But Maskelyne asks, "Might it've been Dieter, d'ye think?" And then confusingly asks Mason to forget about Dieter, so that Mason "is abruptly certain that Dieter is a Ghost as well." He realizes that he has to get away from both the wind and Maskelyne for the sake of his sanity, so he builds a bonfire to signal a ship to pick him up.

The fishing boat carries him to a port two or three miles from James's Town, where the absence of the wind "stuns him." Walking toward the town, he spots a sign advertising "the Jenkin's Ear Museum, dedicated to the eponymous Organ whose timely Display brought England in against Spain in the War of '39." Mason decides to visit the museum, but discovers it is surrounded by a wall whose only entrance seems to be through "a tiny Portico and Gate, no more than three feet high." He enters "a sort of Ramp-way leading downward, with just enough height to crawl" and finds himself in a room carved out of the volcanic rock. He is greeted by the museum's proprietor, Nick Mournival, who proclaims, "Helen of Troy's face may've launch'd a thousand ships, -- this is but one Ear, yet in its Time, it sent navies into combat 'round the Globe." He recognizes Mournival as a friend of Florinda, whom he met in a tavern. He endures Mournival's spiel until he finally shows the Ear, which Mason is startled to perceive is listening. Mournival explains that Ear "can't get enough of human speech ... 'tis Ear's great Hunger, that never abates."

"Ear?"
"Oh? What would you call her? 'Nose?'" 

Encouraged by Mournival to whisper his fondest wish into Ear, Mason decides against wishing for Rebekah's return to life and asks, "A speedy and safe passage for Mr. Dixon, back to this place. For his personal sake, of course, but for my Sanity as well." Then, having paid Mournival, he escapes from the museum, though he later can't remember how, "Unless the real Mason is yet there captive in that exitless Patch, and I but my Representative."

Dixon finally hears this tale when they are "a few days out in their Passage back to England." And he tells Mason, "as near as I can calculate, at exactly the instant you spoke into this Object, I heard, as out of a speaking-trumpet, your message." But Mason quickly realizes Dixon is teasing: "Ahrr! You almost persuaded me, -- why can you never just let it be? -- you had the hook right in my Mouth, Sir."

They speculate on why Maskelyne stays on St. Helena, and decide that he may be hoping for some astronomical breakthrough.

They would rather discuss Maskelyne's Affairs, than what waits in England, in their own Futurity. Through his Correspondence, Maskelyne has heard of one Possibility, tho' 'tis far from a Reduction to Certainty. Following the Chancery decision the year before, as to the Boundaries between the American Provinces of Pennsylvania and Maryland, both Proprietors have petition'd the Astronomer Royal for assistance, using the most modern means available, in marking these out, -- one of them being a Parallel of Latitude, five degrees, an Hundred Leagues, of Wilderness East to West.

Mason suggests that Maskelyne would "rather see us permanently abroad," but he doubts, when Dixon suggests it, that they would send them again as a team.