History's rathouses & Re: blicero's sexuality

[jbor]

----------
>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
>

> Why neglect the positive implication -- and, indeed, the positive
> content -- of Pynchon's narrative?  Plato didn't -- humans might be
> living in the cave, but they can step out into the light.

Yes indeed. This is what Plato thought and wrote and it is the crux of the
Enlightenment and Modernist mindsets as well. Plato and the philosophical
tradition which ensued believed that humans can and should "step out into
the light", and societies and cultures were founded on this very principle
(in general terms, those are the societies and cultures which Pynchon casts
in such a negative light in his texts). Of course, the "light" has been and
is many things to many people, isn't it. It's surely ironic that Plato's
"light" of rational thought and action, and the Christian "light" of
revelation, and the Kirghiz "Light" which nearly blinds Tchitcherine in
_GR_, and the "light" of the Sun which brings organic life to this planet,
are all being conflated as one and the same thing. In each case (except,
perhaps, the last) it's just a *metaphor*.

Rail as Plato might against rhetoric it's what he himself did best when he
put all his eggs into the basket of language.

> Fra Fairing
> may be stuck in the sewer, but we're not -- unless we want to be.

    People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built
    his [sic] own rathouse of history's rags and straws. In the city of
    New York alone there were at a rough estimate five million different
    rathouses.

I think that New York is meant to operate metonymically here. I'm not sure
that choice even enters into it, at least, not in this expository passage.

> We
> can always go up into the light.

Make sure you take some sunscreen.

best