SLSL Wandering Scholars

[Bahia Quasimodo]

> 
> No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
> meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
> the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets
> and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must
set
> him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
> 
> T.S. Eliot,  "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
> (1922). 
> 
> There is no beginning, this side of the classics, to
> a
> history of mediaeval Latin; its roots take hold too
> firmly on the kingdom of the dead. 
> 
> Close to the end of his last term at Cornell, Farina
> seemed to grow impatient.
>                  -Pynchon, Intro. BDSL

Farina, it seems to me, was the wandering scholar.
First off, he was a singer and a poet as were the
wandering scholars. They wrote songs and they often
sang for bread. 

In any event, I still think that this book sticks out
here in the Intro. P goes on and on about Cybernetics
(I've read it and I think Wiener's philosophy is more
interesting than feedback formulas) and he doesn't
msay much about this book at all. It's not Henry
Adams, but maybe it's influence on the short stories
is as important as Graves' influence  on V. 

Birth, and copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks;
Birth, and copulation, and death. 
		--T.S. Eliot, "Sweeny Agonistes" (1932)

A retreat was no place for two virgins. Real virgins.
Probably very religious. If there were no war we would
probably all be in bed. Cathrine was in bed now
between two sheets…Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well,
it blew and it wasn't the small rain but the big rain
down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love
were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love
Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might
rain...No one knew where the Austrians were nor how
things were going but I was certain that if the rain
should stop and the planes come over and get to work
on that column that it would be all over. 
		--Hemingway, _A Farwell To Arms_


He had a momentary, ludicrous vision of himself,
Lardass Levine the Wandering Jew, debating on weekday
evenings in strange and nameless towns with other
wandering Jews the essential problem of identity - not
of the self so much as an identity of place and what
right you really had to be anyplace. He got to the bar
and went inside and there was little Buttercup waiting
for him. 	

Levine shrugged. "all right," he said. It was raining.
Back at the truck Picnic said, "Jesus Christ I hate
rain."

"You and Hemingway," Rizzo said. Funny, ain't it. T.S.
Eliot             likes rain." 	
   
Levine slung his bag over one shoulder. "Rain is
pretty weird that way," he said. "It can stir dull
roots; it can rip them up, wash them away. I will
think of you boys as I bask in the sun down in
N'Orleans, up here up to your ass in water." 


		--Thomas R, Pynchon, "Small Rain"


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