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 Somehow this escalated into a general free-for-all, in which furniture and glassware didn't come out much better than the human participants, a rare sort of behavior among Ætherists, but everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately.

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Being Pynchon, I'm surprised the eruption of a barroom brawl was handled so succinctly. I expected a tray of cream pies to have been rolled into the room just as somebody emptied a bin of banana peels onto the floor. Pynchon's never above a popular trope that modern audiences can easily recognize to regain their attention after wading through paragraphs of high-falutin' philosophical and scientific talk.

Here, we have rational, scientific-minded thinkers breaking into complete and utter violence. It could be commentary on how scientific disputes aren't usually as logical as we common people might think. Passions can erupt when some super smart ass jerk comes along and changes the whole rules of the game so eloquently that it can't be denied. What else can you do but bust them over the head with a whisky bottle?

This could also be one of Thomas Pynchon scant allusions to nuclear proliferation. I wouldn't bet on it but it could be there if you remember how Gravity's Rainbow was all about technology screwing over the masses so eloquently that they could be killed by it before they even knew they were in danger and yet the novel has exactly one scant mention of the atomic bomb. Just a mostly obliterated headling about Hiroshima being bombed. Mostly it's about how plastics got us here and not nuclear fission! That took place during World War II so this bit of Against the Day taking place in the late 19th Century, maybe the only way to allude to nuclear bombs is a barroom brawl between science-minded philosophers and the use of the word "escalated".

"everybody had been feeling at loose ends lately"
Here we return to the idea of loss of faith or, in general, simply loss itself. The peak elation of the people who gathered in Cleveland for the experiment that would prove the existence of Æther has dropped beyond the zero to the trough of disappointment. What they had come for had not been delivered and now they don't know what to do. The end of the world, so to speak, did not come about and now they had to pick up the pieces and find a new path. Loose ends. Feeling lost. A foundational belief about the way the universe worked has been destroyed. Here in the late 19th Century, these cracks and failing are beginning to happen more and more rapidly. Æther has just crashed out and burned. The Frontier's waning. Imperialism is turning back in on itself as the nationals of oppressed nations emigrate to their oppressor's homelands.
    Modern readers in the 21st Century can easily identify with the rapid collapse of seemingly foundational institutions. Feeling at loose ends no longer qualifies as a brief disruption in a long stretch of stability; it has become the stability itself.

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 Merle found himself more often than not the monkey in the middle, trying to calm the dangerously fervid, find work for those who ran short, put people up in the wagon when landlords got mean, trying meantime to stay reasonably unentangled with moneymaking schemes which, frankly, though plentiful as fungi after the rain, verged all too often on the unworkably eccentric, ". . . amount of light in the universe being finite, and diminishing fast enough so that damming, diversion, rationing, not to mention pollution, become possibilities, like water rights, only different, and there's sure to be an international scramble to corner light.

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Merle came to Cleveland as a neutral observer of a historic moment. As an observer, he doesn't have much to do until the thing he came to observe. So he hangs out at bars, brothels, and other bars. While he's waiting, these are things he's involved in, things that shine some light on his overall character. And probably things that are analogies for physics ideas that I'm not smart enough to comprehend.

"monkey in the middle"
A children's game although most often used to bully kids by taking one of their possessions and throwing it over and around them while mocking them for actually wanting their property back. I don't see how this is a metaphor for becoming a person trying to solve problems in other people's business. Perhaps it's meant to call up the visual of a person (the monkey) surrounded by other kids (the non-monkeys) so that the reader accidentally pictures an atom.

"trying to calm the dangerously fervid"
Okay, now that you're picturing an atom, you have to picture what happens when some other atom, or monkey, becomes dangerously hot or glowing. See? Now you've remembered there's a thing called the atom bomb and you've shat yourself.
    On the literal side of things, we just see that Merle's a good guy who knows the cops are out on the street looking to throw overly excited, fervently manic Æther lovers into the asylum. So he's trying to calm them down before they get thrown in Newburgh.

"find work for those who ran short"
Now he's also willing to give off electrons to help out other atoms that are short electrons. He's out here in Cleveland bonding with other people. Oh, and also helping them out with a little cash. If you realize that the cash Merle's using to help others might otherwise be spent on Mia and Madge, you'll start to really get a sense of how honorable Merle is!

"put people up in the wagon when landlords get mean"
Merle's atom is also willing to take on electrons! Plus Pynchon gets a nice dig at landlords, reminding people that they're the least empathic people in America who are willing to throw you out on your arse at the drop of an exorbitant rent payment. Or if you call them too many times to deal with your apartment's rat problem.

"trying meantime to stay reasonably unentangled with moneymaking schemes"
Merle's atom is also trying to avoid quantum entanglement lest he find himself somewhere he wasn't meant to be. Like Lew Basnight, maybe! But also, we see that Merle's not been captured by Capitalism and doesn't easily fall for get rich quick scams.

". . . amount of light in the universe being finite, and diminishing fast enough so that damming, diversion, rationing, not to mention pollution, become possibilities, like water rights, only different, and there's sure to be an international scramble to corner light."
The most capitalistic thing in the world is to privatize natural things that everybody needs to live. Here, Pynchon imagines those capitalists at the forefront of a new understanding of light trying to come up with ways to own and control it. To corner it. To monopolize the whole thing so that if you can't afford it, you'll be living in total darkness, baby!
    The phrase "international scramble" might also be meant to invoke the imperialist "Scramble for Africa" that was currently taking place by nearly every Western nation in the world. Corner water. Corner light. Corner land. Corner people. Corner populations. It's all imperialist and capitalist thought and it's destroying the world. There's a good passage in Gravity's Rainbow about this:

"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..."

The First Chapter Title

 The Light Over the Ranges

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The initial image evoked by this statement is a small avocado green kitchen range sitting up against a greasy peach wall with a two bulb light overhead (one bulb burnt out, the globe filled with the corpses of generations of flies and moths). I'm pretty sure that's not the kind of range Pynchon means.

I suppose he could mean a range of mountains. Or the ranges like in that folk song about that place where the deer play.

The light probably means that thing that we need because it's always night. See how we already have a theme developing? Day and light in every section so far (except the picture of the coin. But for all I know, the writing could be translated as "The main point of this book is to save Daylight Saving Time.").

The second image this statement evokes is of the Northern Lights which makes me think of Gravity's Rainbow and Slothrop's memory of watching the Northern Lights as a youngster and having it scare the feces out of him and his speculation on some other lights after.

"But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . . ."

So I guess besides the Northern Lights, I'm also now thinking of the light of an atomic explosion. But that shouldn't matter in this book, right? It takes place (according to something I read. The back of the book?) between the Chicago's World Fair and World War One. So how would the atomic bomb fit in?

But then also ask yourself this! The atomic bomb would have fit in well in Gravity's Rainbow (even though the entire story takes place in Europe) and it's only mentioned in a cryptic newspaper headline Slothrop notices in a puddle which reads:

MB DRO
ROSHI

So it might exist in this novel as it did in Gravity's Rainbow, as a ghost or a phantom haunting practically everything. It's dramatic irony! We, the reader, know it's coming even if the characters don't know nor will ever know because the novel ends well before the bomb is even invented! I bet it's even a huge specter in Mason & Dixon!

Okay, so maybe I've wandered too far afield on this one. The light over the ranges could also just be symbolic of knowledge being spread. Or maybe it's literal and it's the light from the airship which begins the novel, or just the bright lights of the Chicago World's Fair.

I should declare right here in this section that I will be returning to various entries to add postscripts to them as I get further and further into the novel. So just think of these entries as fluid. Maybe I should also explain that I'm not reading the novel one line at a time and then writing about that line before reading the next line! I'm actually reading the book and then, later, when I'm sitting around bored because none of my friends are playing Apex, writing these entries.

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First Postscript

After having read a bit more, it seems, possibly, that the lights over the ranges could be UFOs.