Fw: forgot to add this Hawthorne story regarding nature and a train

[Mark Kohut]

To interested p-listers.....

I read this story a long
time ago in a book called "Machine in the Garden:
Techonology and the Pastoral Ideal in America."

It is still in print from Oxofrd. Here is a link to
it at Amaozn with a "look inside":
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195133501/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-9645325-2171354#reader-link

seems the bulk of the story is from pages eleven to twenties. (I probably
never finished the book!)

put "train" or 'railroad" into search box......
some fascinating stuff...on first railroad in America...on
the train sound disturbing the quiet.....on Hawthorne's
---home (in fiction)  of an earlier Pyncheon............

MK

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 8, 2007 6:21:02 PM
Subject: forgot to add this Hawthorne story regarding nature and a train


There is a minorly famous Hawthorne story that I think of when 
I reflect on TRP and railroads. 
 
Hawthorne, while still a self-apprenticed writer, decided one fine day
to go out into his Masschsetts woods and write...one thing he had decided,
to overcome that 'what to write about' writer's block-thing, was to capture 
his own sensations and perceptions on paper as an exercise in right noticing, so
to speak.  
 
He started doing that, capturing 'nature' when suddenly Nature was pierced
by a train whistle....his journal entry became mostly about that sound as it 
hit him, grew, changed pitch and whistled, passed and faded.
 
I would bet TRP knows the story/entry and I wonder if it was just a tiny 
morsel that has fed his vision....
 
(and I thought of this story obliquely at the beginning of AtD when the Chums,
descending, flush the fully-clother photographer and the naked woman......)
 
MK
 

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