Atdtda22: Berliner, 626-627

[Mark Kohut]

Subject: Atdtda22: Berliner, 626-627

A brief section that opens with an allusion to the JFK myth, be it
misleading or not: either way, the allusion takes us outside the narrative,
asking the reader to supply the meaning. Again, one might return to Kit's
wakening, his experience of the non-referential tie (624): one cannot impose
meaning, "so we must resort to Phenomenology, and accept the literal truth
of his delusion" (626). Against such relativism Kit retains his belief in
something called the real world ("... if that doesn't bring him back to the
real world", 627); but Dingkopf, previously so determined to impose his
interpretation of the world, is here non-judgemental when discussing the
Berliner.

MK: Gottingen and Henry Adams

I am reading "Henry Adams and the Making of America", a new book, not least because
TRP was hugely influenced by Henry Adams during his early vision-forming years. 

I am finding fascinating stuff......North/South, i.e.. Male/Female distinctions [sez Mr. Wills] --- (orig from Jefferson!)
to follow.......but in that regard HA wrote POSITIVELY of "pigs in the street" [in the Southern US] in his Education of
Henry Adams!....

A-And I learn that Gottingen was not just a center for mathematics study, but for classical languages, biblical criticism
and History.........
       "New England felt an especial affinity with Germany at this time, and Harvard became a hive of Germanists. 
         Instructors there who had studied at Gottingen alone included Edward Everett, George Bancroft. Joseph Cogswell,      
         George Ticknor---and, of course, Henry Adams"...ff.
         "The concept of a Teutonic racial germ of "forest democracy" was the learned fashion of the time."  p.39

        " Another source of the New Englanders' fascination with Germany---along with the mystical notion of the Volk---
          was the Transcendentalists' interest in the philosophical idealism of Kant and the romantic idealismm of Goethe" 

          "Adams claimed to be immune from Transcendentalism [but his wife's mother published in Emerson's Journal] and his own
            later admiration of "oriental religions" parralled that of Thoreau." The nature mysticism of his novel Esther, and his "Buddhist"
            poems, shows that Transcendentalism left a deeper mark on him than he would later admit."

            Now there's new meaning to "n + 1! ....ad inifinitum.......


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