MD3PAD 343-345

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: MD3PAD 343-345
> 
>         Dixon asks what the men are smoking and he is told that since
> tobacco is scarce, they smoke twisted cigars called stogies. 

Would the purport of "Not much tobacco where you boys are from?" not rather be, "since tobacco is plentiful here"?  They're not far from Chesapeake, with its "endless acres" of the stuff, are they?

>The smoker
> blows a smoke ring that has one side and one edge. In a brief
> parenthesis, Wicks is challenged on this point by his audience.

I've seen a square one on TV, but never a Moebian

> 
>         It soon becomes clear that Mason and Dixon will not be allowed
> to see the site of the massacre and  they retire to their rooms to spend
> a restless night. Mason contemplates the reasons for the european need
> to explore and classify everything in the new world. He posits that
> people are looking for the realization of mythical kingdoms, such as the
> garden of eden or the fountain of youth.  He mentions Prester John,
> which was a medieval legendary ruler of a lost Christian kingdom in the
> orient.

Mason is next to speak after the paragraph that begins, "Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream?"
But I was inclined to partly attribute the paragraph to Dixon, Wicks and ethereal Narrator, too; or since it drills down to a primary theme - things lost and gained in surveying, mapping, the world - maybe even to a more than usually immanent auctorial Presence.  (but also reminiscent of Eliot's idea that the end of all our journeying is to know the world for the 1st time, and be nudged - a bit unwillingly? - towards faith as Mason is in his musings in the next paragraph)