SLSL: mortality & mercy in vienna/: eddins

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

--- vze422fs at verizon.net wrote:
> 
>  But handing the power of religion to a Dark Ages
> European king or a 21st
> Century American President is like handing an H-bomb
> to a seventeen-year old
> crack dealer. If you think that it will be used
> responsibly, then you might
> also believe that I am really sitting here with
> Santa Claus, the Easter
> Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

"In the ages of the rude beginning of culture,"
Nietzsche states, "man believed that he was
discovering a second real world in dream, and here is
the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, mankind
would never have had occasion to invent such a
division of the world. The parting of soul and body
goes also with this way of interpreting dreams;
likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body:
whence all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in
gods."

The origin of all metaphysics? And if we kill God,
will we put an end to metaphysics?  

Blame it on metaphysics, God,  and dream. 

What is the difference between Religion and
Civilization? To Freud, there is no difference. Blame
it on Jesus. Blame it on Buddha. Blame it on Man and
his religion. Blame it on the West. Blame it on the
East. 

Most of us can attest to the fact that our first
worldviews, and particularly our religious beliefs,
were acquired through our families. Blame it on the
family. 

In some cultural contexts, secularization never
occurs; in others, a public education gradually
introduces other systems of thought.  Why it is that
so many educated people in the West come to hate
religion, particularly the Christian religion, is
worth considering.  Freud looked at religion and
science as mortal enemies. Well, as Pynchon says at
the end of the Slow Learner Introduction, "Henry Adams
sez…." 

Henry Adams sought to measure the European twelfth
century against the American late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. His method concentrated on the
vital principles that characterized both eras. Thus,
the medieval Virgin (Religion) appears first in
Chartres and later is compared and contrasted with the
modern dynamo (the force of electric power), when the
conjunction becomes explicit in Chapter 25 of the
Education.  Why is the same symbolic progression used
to suggest the path of his personal intellectual
voyage to increased understanding? 
And why does Pynchon so in love with Henry's symbols
and his intellectual journey? 

Marlow alone, among the members of the expedition, can
understand the anture of Kurt's FALL because he has
experienced the same Temptation. But, although the
Darkness calls him, he does not resply to its calling.
He may feel alienated from his fellow men, both in the
jungle and upon his return to "civilization," but he
has not, like a fallen Angel, cut himself off from
grace and the world of light. The dream-world of Kurtz
shkes Marlow to the bone. He keeps his head, if not
his soberness. In the Secret Sharing of this
dream-world he is awakened to the nightmare of
isolation' Kurts has kicked loose the earth, kicked it
to pieces. This is what comes of yielding to the dark
power of the forest and the darkness at the heart of
man. Yet Marlow knows that there is a moral victory,
an affirmation, on the ivory face of the dead Mr.
Kurtz. 

Marlow recovers from his illness and wanders the city
like Ishmael before he set out to hunt the white
whale. He is bitter, angry... and he his haunted by
the vision of Kurtz dying. The vision becomes a dream
(rather a nightmare) he can't share with anyone else. 

What has he laerned? 

He has learned to respect man's faith, Any faith or
sincere conviction. It is something we secretly share,
something we live as we dream, alone. 




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