NPPF Comm4: Metadiscussion, anybody?

[David Morris]

--- Don Corathers <gumbo at fuse.net> wrote:
> 
> Line 71: parents (p 100)
> 
> We learn a little more about Shade's parents: that his father Samuel, vice
president of a surgical instruments company and ornithologist, died in 1902,
when Shade was four. That his mother Caroline was a skilled artist who did the
drawings for Samuel's book about Mexican birds. Kinbote doesn't report when
Shade's mother died.

I don't have the book in front of me, but the poem does list two diseases as
the causes of their deaths.  But the poem also says he was an "infant" when
they died, and four is beyond the normal definition of infancy (although
legally it means a minor).  Four year olds are usually called toddlers.  I
think the advent of walking and talking is the divider between infant and
toddler.

Lukin: Luke:

http://21.1911encyclopedia.org/L/LU/LUKE.htm

LUKE, the traditional author of the third Gospel and of the Book of Acts, and
the most literary among the writers of the New Testament. He alone, too, was of
non-Jewish origin (Col. iv. II, 14), a fact of great interest in relation to
his writings. His name, a more familiar form of Lucanus, taken together with
his profession of physician (Col. iv. 14), suggests that he was son of a Greek
freedman possibly connected with Lucania in south Italy; and as Julius Caesar
gave Roman citizenship to all physicians in Rome (Sueton. Jul. 42), Luke may
even have inherited this status from his father. But in any case such a man
would have the attitude to things Roman which appears in the works attributed
to Luke. He was a fellow-worker of Paul’s when in Rome (Philemon 24), where he
seems to have remained in constant attendance on his leader, as physician as
well as attached friend (Col. iv. ~ 2 Tim. iv. 11). That Luke, before he became
a Christian, was an adherent of the synagogue-not a full proselyte, but one of
those “ worshippers “ of God to whom Acts makes frequent reference-—is fairly
certain from the familiarity with the Septuagint indicated in Acts, as well as
from its sympathy with the Hellenistic type of piety as distinct from specific
Paulinism, of which there is but little trace.

http://www.onelook.com/?other=web1913&w=Luke
Luke
(a.) Moderately warm; not hot; tepid. 


> " 'a bird had been named for him: Bombycilla Shadei' (that should be
'shadei,' of course)." Bombycilla is the genus name for the waxwing. The common
North American waxwing is Bombycilla garrulus. The cedar waxwing, Bombycilla
cedorum, is a close relative. The one that hit the window was Bombycilla
shadei.

This tidbit hints that the waxwing slain could be Shade's Father, and the
shadow of the slain father would be Shade, and would be still untill Shade's
death.
 
> If the point of this discussion, which is I think essentially recreational,
is to share the pleasures of unlocking a difficult work of art together, it
seems to me it is much too early in the game to begin posting big slabs of
received wisdom.

I agree, like a brainstorming session.  But if someone wants to quote Boyd,
that's cool too.

David Morris


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