GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

"Andignac, David" wrote:
> 
> > >From: Doug Millison
> > >
> > >At 7:22 AM +1100 12/14/99, rj wrote:
> > > >"The boy wants to fuck ... " (100.5-6)
> > >
> > >Which is the claim of innocence that every child molester makes. Of
> > course
> > >Blicero will defend his crime in this manner.
> > >
> >
> > Such a reading is possible, but it takes the blinders of the Moral
> > Majority
> > to make it stick.
> >
> > DM
> >
>         Look where the War has taken us. Now molestation and pedophilia are
> no longer evil in themselves.
> 
>         Does Pointsman think he is evil? Does Blicero? Did Hitler? This is
> the danger that IMHO, Pynchon points out through much of the novel. When we
> start to believe that there is no inherent good or evil, only relative grey
> areas, we can justify anything.
> 
>         I feel that he attempts to trap us in many cases, by tempting us to
> buy into these justifications so that we have to question our own moral
> center.
> 
>         It is the same question that William S. Burroughs presents to us so
> often, "Wouldn't you?"
> 
>         David A.
> > ______________________________________________________
> > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com


I can dig that. 




		"Digging"

        By Seamus Heaney 
        1995 Nobel Prize for Literature

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.

        Under my window, a clean rasping sound
        When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
        My father, digging. I look down

        Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
        Bends low, comes up twenty years away
        Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
        Where he was digging.

        The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
against the inside knee was
        levered firmly.
        He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
        To scatter new potatoes that we picked
        Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

        By God, the old man could handle a spade.
        Just like his old man.

        ... 

        The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
        Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
        Through living roots awaken in my head.
        But I've no spade to follow men like them.

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests.
        I'll dig with it.

        1966 from "Death of a Naturalist"