For more than a half-century, Thomas Pynchon’s commitment to audition - the acts of hearing and of listening, and the attendant power of these faculties – has been so pronounced that sound in his fiction often arrives before the visual. Take Mason & Dixon (1997), for example. Lost in “late-Day Invisibility” on his way to the Mary and Meg, Dixon hears the premonitory church bells of America an ocean away, “peculiarly lucid in the fog” (MD 244); when he and Mason finally do arrive in the New World, their initial impressions are exclusively auditory: “Milkmaids quarrelling and cowbells a-clank, and dogs, and Babies old and new,— Hammers upon Nails, Wives upon Husbands, the ring of Pot-lids, the jingling of Draft-chains, a rifle-shot from a stretch of woods, lengthily crackling tree to tree” (MD 257). The sound of the scene reaches the reader before light enables sight. Not only is this a neat reversal of natural phenomena, but it is also an emphasis on re-vision, on modes of apprehension beyond the visual.