Atdtda[4]: 108.1 Lapsing back into anonymity

[Michel]

Miles (latin word for soldier) meditates:
"At one time," related Miles Blundell, "in the days of the first 
explorers, each one of these islands, no matter how small, was given its 
own name, so amazing was their abundance in the sea, so grateful to God 
were their discoverers for any sort of landfall ... but nowadays the 
names are being lost, this sea is lapsing back into anonymity, each 
island rising from it only another dark desert." (107.22-108.2)

Then the narrator (?) takes over.  "[I]slets" are thus removed from the 
map, and so they disappear "from the lighted world as well, to rejoin 
the Invisible." (108.3-4).

1. Does Miles simply deplore this loss in the act of naming, or is it more?
2. Somehow this reminds me of Eco's "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina 
nuda tenemus", meaning literally: "remains the rose of earlier time by 
name, names, nude, we keep." to which it is a contrast, it seems: in the 
nominalistic stance it says that whatever happens to the object, we 
always have its name, or definition; here in the text, the act of 
unnaming makes the object disappear
3. The Invisible: cfr. 99.1.  These two instances of the Invisible are 
surrounded by more mystic mood in the text.

Michel.





	

	
		
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