MDMD(5)----Rebekah

[Steven Maas (CUTR)]

164.7-14 "[Mason] tries to joke with himself.  Isn't this suppos'd to be
the Age of Reason?  To believe in the cold light of this all-business
world that Rebekah haunts him is to slip, to stagger in a crowd, into the
embrace of the Painted Italian Whore herself, and the Air to fill with
suffocating incense, and the radiant Deity to go dim forever.  But if
Reason be also Permission at last to believe in the evidence of our
Earthly Senses, then how can he not concede to her some Resurrection?--to
deny her, how cruel!"

Eric W. asked:
> 164.10`the Painted Italian Whore' ---The Catholic Church?

Christine K. said:
> It seems to me that the PIW is biblical, maybe out of the Revelation?
> Is that the Whore of Babylon story?  (Goodness, after flaunting those
> stripes I earned under the Dominicans you'd think I'd remember such a
> thing, but no.)  Or maybe it's something else.  Could it be a Dantean
> allegory?  (Hellooo, Heikki!  Hellooo, Monte!)  In any event, the phrase
> seems clearly representative of the cravings of the flesh, which is
> compatible with Eric's reading of Rebekah as a former prostitute

I have to agree with Eric here, I think the PIW refers to the RC with its
incense as a representative of superstition and everything else that's
wrong with the old, set up here in opposition to the logical and
reasonable world of the Age of Reason (yeah right).  I don't read it as
representing the cravings of the flesh, except perhaps to the extent that
cravings of the flesh are another representative of the old that is now to
be overcome what with all that Reason floating around.

Eric W. asked:
> 164.11  "the radiant Deity to go dim forever"
> Problems of faith and problems of Reason here. Are we
> looking at the Protestant God or at the deity of Newtonian
> Science? Knowing Mason's personality and something
> of his convictions, prejudices and fears,-- what do we think
> these episodes disrupt, catalyse, project, reform,-- within
> his view of himself and his world?

I think the latter, i.e. Newtonianism and the Age of Reason.  The passage
seems to represent Mason's struggles to reconcile his Romanticism, the
old, with his "radiant Deity" of Reason, the new.  Excuse me while I yet
further belabor the obvious--he's afraid that surrendering to the belief
that ghosts exist will permanently dim his ability to believe in Reason.
Yet Reason also insists that you believe the evidence of your senses--a
cruel quandary our friend seems inextricably enmeshed in. 

	Steve Maas