ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

We are safely past the days of the Eis-Heiligen
---St. Pancratius, St. Servatus, St. Bonifacius, 
dis kalte Sophie . . . they hover in clouds above 
the vineyards, holy beings of ice, ready with a 
breath, an intention, to ruin the year with frost 
and cold. In certain years, especially War years, 
they are short on charity, peevish, smug in their 
power: not quite saintly or even Christian. The 
prayers of growers, pickers and wine enthusiasts 
must reach them, but there's no telling what the 
ice-saints feel---coarse laughter, pagan annoyance, 
who understands this rear-guard who preserve 
winter against the revolutionaries of May? 
GR, 285 (New Penguin) 


"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.'"