Chapter 1: Page 6: Line 4

 This Christmastide of 1786, with the War settl'd and the Nation bickering itself into Fragments, wounds bodily and ghostly, great and small, go aching on, not ev'ry one commemorated,— nor, too often, even recounted.

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Line 4 Vulgarized:
It's Christmas 1786 and the Revolutionary War is over but young America, composed of 13 young, dumb states, was in a new conflict about how the states were going to get along because these Articles of Confederation weren't meant to last forever and somebody was going to have to do something about it, like maybe hold a convention in Philadelphia or something. And this Christmas, with the war not too long in the past, everybody was still dealing with some physical wound or emotional trauma, maybe as severe as a lost limb or as simple as a neighbor's hurtful words (possibly traitorous!), pains and aches that were maybe mentioned once and done with, maybe blathered on about over and over, or maybe kept secret from the outset.

Subtext:
The subtext is that I'm not sure I know what I'm talking about, even when trying to Vulgarize the passage! Did I read this right?! That's a rhetorical question because unless you're Thomas Pynchon, you don't fucking know either! But I'll give the subtext a shot anyway!
    This book is about boundaries and here we see mention of a Nation still somewhat divided. How? I don't know since I wasn't there in 1786 and I'm no historian. Why was the nation bickering itself into Fragments? I have thoughts which I voiced in my Vulgarization. Constitutional thoughts! But here we see how the boundaries between states aren't just important physical divides but ideological ones as well. And each state has been wounded by war and differences in ideology in various ways: bodily might be states that saw a lot of fighting; ghostly were states impacted less directly, maybe economically or simply by having to send a bunch of young men off to fight. States wounded in great and small ways, the further from the sites of physical battle, probably the smaller the wounds. And not all of these conflicts were commemorated, not all of them recounted and told to the history books. Many would go unseen and unknown by time, only witnessed by those who experienced them.