Adams, "The Virgin and the Dynamo"

[Dave Monroe]

... a short excerpt from Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New
York: Penguin, 1995 [1918]), Chapter XXV, "The Virgin and the Dynamo"
(pp. 360-370):

... to Adams, the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.  As he grew
accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the
forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt
about the Cross.  The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its
old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge
wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and
barely murmuring--scracely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's
breadth furthe for respect of power--while it would not wake the baby
lying close to its frame.  (361)

Dynamo and child?  A la Madonna and ...  whilst "the force of the Virgin
was still felt at Lourdes" (364), "the highest energy ever known to man,
the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more
attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos
ever dreamed of" (365).  The Virgin dynamic, the Dynamo maternal (to
what relation, perhaps, at V.'s, at Pynchon's end, with those "celibate
machines" of Duchamp and Leiris and Picabia, et al.?) ... "but in
America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value"--all those "v"s! and
note "revolution," "revolving," "vertiginous" ... --"as force--at most
as sentiment.  No American had ever been truly afraid of either" (364);
"and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind.  An American
Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare
exist" (365) ... anyway, find interesting how Adams kinda sorta, er,
deconstructs that dynamo/Virgin binary even as he inscribes it, is all
... "For Adams's objects its value lay chiefly in its occult mechanism"
(361)--a sort of black box there, a sort of S-Gerat?  Hm ...