M&D 228

[Brian D. McCary]

************Mason & Dixon Spoiler***************

1)	Without being able to place a referance passage to it
exactly, one background theme which re-emerges in the meetings
with JJ Lalande and Christopher Maire is the fierce but subverted
competition between the British and the French, and the consequences
thereof.  Similar to the Fashoda incident which he uses in V.  I
can't think of much more to say about this right now.

2)	p. 207, bottom.  "How could he allow that she might have her
own story?  How could he choose the easier road, and refer her to some
male character, the love-crazy Poet, the tempted Innocent?  Was he
supposed to light a pipe, pick her up, settle back, and read her all at
one sitting?  Was this what women wanted?  Whom could he ask?"

	I love this passage.  It states one of the fatal errors which
people can make in relationships (trying to replace others with characatures)
and at the same time, I think it underscores the illusion we sometimes
have that there is a right answer, that there is someone out there who
can tell us what we are supposed to do.  Finally, at a second level,
it embodies the question TRP addressed to Jules, "Why should it be 
easy."  Could he be commenting on his readers and critics here as well?
(Jeez, that was badly stated)

3) 	p. 210, at Stonehenge.  Mason comments that his family has
been millers and bakers for generations, not cutters and movers of
stone.  Idle curiosity:  could milling have been one of those professions
which would evolve out of masonry, what with finding, cutting, and 
transporting the millstone?  Bakers could certainly evolve professionally
from millers.  If so, is there a silent and as yet un-revealed connection
between Mason and the Masons?  When were the Masons (Freemasons?) founded?
I tend to doubt the connection, but the Masons seem like a classic subject
for the paranoid, and we've seen them surface before in GR.

Brian McCary.