How to Choose a Novel

[grladams at teleport.com]

Has anyone seen this?
www.whichbook.net
I wish I could find out the quantity of their set of books. 


Jill Adams


Original Message:
-----------------
From: David Payne dpayne1912 at hotmail.com
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:05:07 +0000
To: markekohut at yahoo.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: RE: How to Choose a Novel


Mark Kohut (Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:01:32 -0800) wrote:
 
> Anyone know what is on page 69 of The Gutenberg Galaxy?
 
You were probably just making silly, but good thinking: As it turns out,
the author presents his thesis (in the edition I found), which seems more
than coincidence. 
 
You can read page 69 on Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=y4C644zHCWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Gut
enberg+Galaxy&sig=OpIaC5B7sVAh6q7gmPnHzbkZgGs#PPA69,M1
 
Here's a copy. Excuse my typos: I was unable to grab the text & I am
reacting badly to a cat at teh moment ("there's a tear in my beer" ... or
there would be if I had a beer). Note that this page starts with a long
quote, which I've awkwardly attempted to note by the addition of ["...] to
the beginning of the text. Also, there's some weird formatting, long lines
and big BF text halfway through, that I hope will be readable in this here
email:
 

[“
]cosmos, is recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. It does
not devolve upon us to show by what historical processes and as the result
of what changes in spiritual attitudes and behavior modern man has
desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence. For our purpose it
is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of
the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds
it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of
religious man in the archaic societies.[”] (p. 13)
 
Eliade is under a gross illusion in supposing that modern man “finds it
increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of
religious man in the archaic societies.” Modern man, since the
electro-magnetic discoveries of more than a century ago, is investing
himself with all the dimensions of archaic man plus. The art an scholarship
of the past century and more have become a monotonous crescendo of archaic
primitivism. Eliade’s own work is an extreme popularization of such art and
scholarship. But that is not to say that he is factually wrong. Certainly
he is right in saying that “the wholly desacralized cosmos is a recent
discovery in the history of the human spirit.” In fact, the discovery
results from the phonetic alphabet and the acceptance of its consequences,
especially since Gutenberg. But I question the quality of insight that
causes a human voice to quaver and resonate with hebdomadal vehemence when
citing the “history of the human spirit.”
 

The Gutenberg Galaxy is concerned to show why alphabetic man was disposed
to desacralize his mode of being.
* The later section of this book will accept the role declined by Eliade
when he says: “It does not devolve upon us to show by what historical
processes 
 modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane
existence.” To show by exactly what historical process this was done is the
theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy. And having shown the process, we can at
least make a conscious and responsible choice concerning whether we elect
once more the tribal mode which has such attraction for Eliade:
 
[“] The abyss that divides the two modalities of experience—sacred and
profane—will be apparent when we come to describe sacred space and the
ritual building of the human habitation, or the varieties of the religious
[”
]
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