Towards the edge

Sociology Professor Jeremy Freese recalls the Malta based novel by Thomas Pynchon he read fifteen years ago as he prepares to move from Madison to Cambridge. From Jeremy Freese's Weblog:

Several times in the past few days, when I've thought about leaving this place and heading off to Cambridge, into my mind has come the ending of a novel I read back in my early days of college. I don't really know why exactly the passage comes to mind, but my suspicion is that the way I'm feeling now is sort of like what I felt as I first read this passage fifteen years ago. Or something.

Just now, in the throes of insomnia and thinking about it again, I finally went over to the bookshelves and looked it up. The passage is from Thomas Pynchon's V. (no relation to the cheesy alien-invasion miniseries). The scene takes place in Valletta (Malta), in 1956. One of the novel's two protagonists, the wandering ex-Navy seaman Benny Profane, is talking to a random American tourist, Brenda Wigglesworth, abroad for the first time, who he met in a bar the evening before. They are standing outside another bar, chatting mundanely about what they have done with their lives to that point...

"..Later, out in the street, near the sea steps she inexplicably took his hand and began to run. The buildings in this part of Valletta, eleven years after war's end, had not been rebuilt. The street, however, was level and clear. Hand in hand with Brenda whom he'd met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presenly, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond."