Prognostication on the P-list

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I’m looking at the timeline covered by “Against the Day”---1893 to the years after WWI---and realize that a tremendous outpouring of great literature appeared during those years. I’ve been reading “Swann’s Way” in the recent Lydia Davis translation. Here is a taste of 1908:

“ . . . “Come and keep your old friend company,” he had said to me. “Like a bouquet sent to us by a traveler from a country to which we will never return, allow me to breath from the distance of your adolescence those flowers that belong to the springtimes which I too traversed many years ago. Come with the primrose, the monk’s beard, the buttercup, come with the sedum that makes the bouquet of love in Balzac’s flora, come with the flower of Resurrection Day, the Easter daisy, and the garden snowdrop, which is beginning to perfume your great-aunt’s paths even though the last snows dropped by the Easter showers have not melted. Come with the glorious silk raiment worthy of Solomon himself, and with the breeze still cool from the last frosts, that will open the petals, for the two butterflies that have waited at its door since morning, of the first Jerusalem rose.”

from Mike Weaver:

" A suggestion: The paranoia set off by staccato appearance of details, the hopes and fears and giddiness released, seem to have left in their trail rich pickings. We could spend those 100 odd days exploring them. What went on between 1893 and 1923, in Chicago, New York, London, Gottingen, Venice,  Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia , Mexico, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood. (If we exhaust that theme could check out those off the map places)"

-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk>
Subject: Re:  Prognostication on the P-list 
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 23:57:02 +0000
Size: 2097
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20060810/87617c69/attachment.mht>