MDDM Ch. 77 Dogs and dogsbodies

[jbor]

[...]

>> but Ives snorts that it was "[m]ore likely ... they didn't
>> 
>> pass within a hundred miles of Mason" (744.4), which is a different
>> 
>> proposition entirely.
> 
> It might be different. It might not.

Well, no. Time is the variable which you overlook (and cf. 746.4-7). Ives'
point is that they were probably never closer than a hundred miles from each
other. There's no need, logically or lexically, for this to be plotted on an
east-west axis.

> But 
> I'm not out to prove anything here. If you feel your reading is
> more accurate, by all means...

The reference in Ch. 77 to "any Third Observer" relates to a subsequent
meeting between Dixon and Mason, and foregrounds Jere's increasing physical
frailty and Mason's further retreat into "Melancholy". It's simply a way of
saying that *anybody* who knew them would immediately notice the changes.
But the point is that there *wasn't* a "Third Observer", someone there who
would have been able to detect these changes. The irony or paradox is that
the record of their "history" which is recounted here in the text is
entirely fictionalised, the actual circumstances and conversations of these
later meetings having been lost to that "Void of forgetfulness". (And it
draws the reader's attention to the fact that almost everything else which
is narrated in the novel has been fabulated in precisely the same way.)

I didn't think that Boswell was being referenced, obliquely or otherwise, in
the phrase. No big deal, though.

> Mason, however, seems to see himself in Johnson.

I didn't get this impression. Is there something specific in the text ...?

> Johnson is rude and arrogant, no doubt, but I don't see patrician.
> Nor does he seem to patronize, imo. His aside to Boswell, "how
> even a Lunatick may be civil...," and more directly to Mason, "Or
> is it Your Holiness?" are hysterically funny.

Funny-nasty rather than funny-matey, however. Johnson is superior, sneering,
condescending etc. just like Franklin was. But I agree that Franklin is more
devious, more of a con-man than Johnson. Johnson has no use for Mason and so
insults him to his face right from the get-go. Franklin tries it on with the
boys first, realises he's getting nowhere, then reverts.

>> Also, back a bit, why would the ghost of a 17th C. Jesuit mathematician be

>> wearing a Slouch Hat (704-5)?

> Why not?

Just asking. I'm pretty certain that the slouch hat is relevant: a
deliberate clue about the stranger's identity which has been given to the
reader. In every other instance in the novel the obscure mathematicians,
astronomers &c referred to are explicitly named in the text. No matter.

best