ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Ya Sam]

"Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living 
voluntarily among ice and high mountains, seeking out everything strange and 
questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality. 
The ice is near, the solitude tremendous, but how serenely all things lie in 
the light, how freely one breathes; how much one feels, lies beneath 
oneself." Friedrich Nietzsche


>This is all mixed in with numerous mentions of ice, appropriately enough 
>since we've travelled from the 'White City' to the white wastes of the 
>North. There's the notion that ice may be in some way 'alive', firing up 
>another Pynchon theme, the animate vs. the inanimate. It's suggested that 
>the ice may be "trying to express some argument of its own," there is "bad 
>ice," and "icefields which sought as if with conscious malevolence to take 
>the unwary down like quicksand, without warning". We hear, in one of the 
>last few biographical details about Constance Penhallow, that as a girl she 
>attended a class in school where "the topic of study would be Living 
>Creatures. 'I suggested ice. They threw me out of class.'"
>
>

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