jonathan franzen

[still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made]

On Thu, 15 May 1997, Monte Davis wrote:
> O gods of fair use, protect me. Here's a passage that I admire (and that
> rings many Pynchon bells, for GR as well as M&D) from Franzen's _Strong
> Motion_. It's a rant by one Bob Holland, a surly professor in
> Massachusetts. Sorry for the length, but it's needed for the cumulative
> effect:

I like it!  

> If you'd looked very closely, though, you would have seen that the wealth
> had merely been transformed and concentrated. All the beavers that had
> ever drawn breath in Franklin County, Massachusetts, had been transmuted
> into one solid-silver tea service in a parlor on Myrtle Street in Boston.
> The towering white pines from ten thousand square miles of Commonwealth
> had together built one block of brick town houses on Beacon Hill, with
> high windows and a fleet of carriages, chandeliers from Paris and settees
> upholstered in Chinese silk, all of it occupying less than an acre. A plot
> of land that had once supported five Indians in comfort was condensed into
> a gold ring on the finger of Isaiah Dennis, the great-uncle of Melanie
> Holland's grandfather.

This transmutation from nature to wealth reminds me of what I heard on NPR
this morning.  Apparently an economic think tank has conducted an audit of
Nature, and decided that the world's natural resources and the services they
provide (e.g., plants replenishing atmospheric oxygen, soil and rock
filtering groundwater, etc.) are worth $30 trillion dollars.  I'm not sure
if I should be happy that this will encourage laissez faire capitalists to
respect nature, or sad that money is increasingly the only value scale for
judging the worth of anything.

Unsure what this has to do with TRP,
Max

 M a x i m u s  D a v i d  C l a r k e | The Balkans produce more
          http://www.afn.org/~traveler | history than they can
                 "Surrealist-At-Large" | consume locally.
                      traveler at afn.org | --European proverb