1984 Foreword (Whitman) Tom wanted to be a poet

[Terrance]

Michael Joseph wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 15 May 2003, Terrance wrote:
> 
> > Certainly a contradiction of some sort ... isn't it? [Whitman's 1855
> > preface saturated with the idealism of a previous decade] Although, I'm
> > not sure what in heaven's name happened to Walt I'm not satisfied with
> > the Emersonian reading of the contradiction.
> 
> but look at the 1860 preface; W eventually gets it; as does Emerson,
> right? The Knickerbocker embrace? Entropy sets in, the bombast begins to
> fade ...
> 
> One interesting wrinkle is the change in attitude toward technology and
> science. The bitterness felt toward the industrial revolution originates
> in a euphoria about technology, the Technological Sublime Leo Marx
> describes (see for example http://www.cis.vt.edu/hst/3105/leomarx.pdf). I
> think we should regard P's aversion to the internet more as a resonance of
> a post I.R. humanitarianism than simple cranky Ludditism.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0205&msg=66812&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65017&sort=date

> 
> > I guess what I was trying to say, was not that P could have been
> > Ginsburg or something, but that it's possible that this Foreword is a
> > bit, well, dusty. I don't get the impression that it was, all of it,
> > written recently. Just speculating you know,  but I kinda agree with
> > Paul M. (Paul was speculating as well) that P may have had a longer
> > essay on _1984_ sitting is a shoe box and just pulled it down and dusted
> > it off. The dust, like the dust (that Dickensian "dust") in the creases
> > of the elder Tom's face....is there....in the novel too.
> 
> The indeterminacy of the foreword is what it is. The shoe box laden with
> dust Sounds like Tom Eliot, a prelude, maybe?

_1984_ opens with dust. It is even in the creases in in human faces. 

Although it's important to remember that the characters in _1984_ are
not quite human.