AtDTdA (9): 242

[Jasper]

Thank you for a kick-ass kick-ass essay contribution!

kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
>   
>> From: Jasper <jasper.fidget at gmail.com>
>>     
>
>   
>> Today's kick-ass essay question:
>> Discuss the significance of the railway lines to Renfrew/Werfner, AtD, 
>> and/or Pynchon.  Pay special attention to the idea of "flows of power"; 
>> Renfrew says this can be expressed as "massive troop movements", but 
>> note also that railways help facilitate trade, and strong trading 
>> partners rarely go to war with one another.  (Of course they often team 
>> up and go to war against some other team....)  Also consider the idea of 
>> rail-worthiness.  Who decides?  Super-scholars may choose to make 
>> connections with Pynchon's other work (COL49 and M&D come immediately to 
>> mind).
>>     
>
> Looking at the railway close up (a six-mile stretch, to be exact):
>
> http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0224/p04s01-wosc.html
>
> The rail link between India and Pakistan is an interesting case.  Built by British imperialists, for whom local cultural/religious divisions were irrelevant, solely to serve their military aspirations.  The British were ousted and the Indian-Pakistani border established resulting in the termination of the rail link in 1965 as the situation degenerated into war.  But all people on both sides of the border wanted was to be able to visit family and friends a mere six miles away, so in 2004, both governments agreed to a weekly train.  An easy geographic extension became an impossible road to travel. A military imperialist railroad became a warm, cuddly humanitarian link.  
>
> Looking at it from a distance:
>
> ATD, p. 259:
>
> "' No reflections upon the Manchurian question can usefully neglect the Trans-Siberian Railroad.'he [Chick Counterfly]  pointed out. 'From a high enough altitude, as we have often observed, indeed that great project appears almost like a living organism, one dares to say a conscious one, with needs and plans of its own.  For our immediate purposes, in opening up huge regions of Inner Asia, it can only make more inevitable Russian, and, to a degree, European access to Shambhala, wherever that may prove to lie.'"
>
> Like the passage where Renfrew advises Lew to back away from the railway map, it's only by looking at the railroad from a considerable distance that one can begin to fathom its true nature.  Close in, it's about imperialism and, possibly, the quest for some sort of human enlightenment.  From far away, it becomes almost a natural being, like the rock formations outside Jeshimon or in Iceland; whose benevolence and/or malevolence is beyond human understanding or control.  
>
> Laura
>
>