MDDM Ch 75 Love that's love will not...

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

Maybe one needs be at least "contemporaneous"
with Jere to be really moved by his tale of fading light
in the hollows of mother earth, but there it is. I was
touched.

And so, obviously, was the more vital Mason, "...ignoring
what is just behind his Eyes and Nose." [743.07]
Ironinc that Mason is holding back at this late stage
more out of concern for Jere than out of his more typical 
desire not to feel (or show) his love for him. I know- Mason 
was probably more affected by Jere's frail presence than 
by the tale- the telling of which stikes me as self-parody, 
probably consciously so. Dixon, as usual, is way ahead of him.

What strike's me more about the tale than it's subtle
form of verbal embrace between the two heroes, is
it's ironic inversion of the role of empiricism in the
growth of modern science, which, apparently, will soon
sweep away the "fairy dust" [Johnson, b/t/w, imo, is
one of the more odious historical characters satirized
in the novel- give me the Therese-fucking Boswell any
day] of their tenebrous exisitence. In fact, the growth
of modern science is based on a turning away from the
deceptions presented to even the most young and acute
of sensory systems- maybe especially those- and, the
construction and embrace of "another space" which is
a fitting, if ironic, anti-trope for the frictionless ideal space
of DeCartes, where the "reality" of inertia would finally
manifest itself, freed from the aristotelian-like common
sense of the middle-ages. The growth of modern science
represents a retreat "From those terrible Lights, great
and small" back into Plato's cave, into the blatantly
analytic, the carcus-ladden cargo hold of the dead.

In his fraility, Jere is becoming quite the pomo savant.