Atdtda22: [42.2ii] The empty suburban lamplight, 614

[Mark Kohut]

Once again, I'll risk reductionism by suggesting:
 
Natural light is almost always a positive in AtD.
Electric light is almost always not. 
 
Natural darkness, in a natural setting, is usually a positive as well....
 
"unmerciful whiteness"..and..."dream-silvered".....
Dreams, so often the realm of the positive in TRPs work
sounds like it has been processed and produced like a photograph here.
 
ATD, in the offhand depth of its vision of nature more or less uncontaminated,
may contain---with M &D---TRPs broadest vision of "the good life"---as visionary glimpses, as elements
of a larger whole, as something pointed to and NOT reduced to literalness----as Monte and others
rightly point out would narrow OBAs meanings like any stockyard chute or grid lines......
 
AtD (among much else): What we have lost that has eliminated or reduced the possibilites of a full "good life" in our modern times---and for a long while in History.  
 
IMHO
 
Mark
 


 
----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 12:03:54 PM
Subject: RE: Atdtda22: [42.2ii] The empty suburban lamplight, 614

These are *very* illuminating citations, Paul, another reminder that the
book's title (and the Thelonious Monk epigraph) never stop radiating
throughout.

In AtD, thematic work is being done almost every time there's a
juxtaposition of city/light (and modernity? I think yes) and other kinds of
lighting, whether it's the Home Counties or Colorado:

"The railroad towns, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, and them, were
pretty stodgy by comparison, what Webb mostly remembered being the sunlight.
Telluride was in the nature of an outing to a depraved amusement resort,
whose electric lighting at night in its extreme and unmerciful whiteness
produced a dream-silvered rogues' district..." (89)


Or the Adriatic:

"Here in this ancient town progressively settling into a mask of itself, she
began to look for episodes of counter-light... Hunter argued that this was
why so many people had come to love Venice, because of its 'chiaroscuro.' "
(582)

" 'All these islands will be linked by motorways. Electricity everywhere,
anyone who still wants Venetian moonlight will have to visit a museum.' "
(585)


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