The phrase

[David Payne]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:52:05 -0600, David Morris  wrote:

> The "Realm of the Penny-foolish and Pound-idiotick" is the same place
> as "contrary to Reason,"

OK -- my turn for a minor quibble: I do not have the book with me, but as I recall, the party is stuck in a sort of limbo (snow-bound?), teetering on the edge of wilderness and civilization, where they are partying it up like there's no tomorrow, knowing that they have to move forward to a day of reckoning in "the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia" (p. 687). I see the "Realm of the Penny-foolish and Pound-idiotick" as the limbo in which they stand. Reason would have them head east from the limbo and return to Philadelphia -- but "contrary to Reason" is the possibility that they contemplate of moving west, heading out of the limbo-land of the “Realm of the Penny-foolish” to return back into the wilderness. 

Note that the phrase "against the Day" (p. 683) is followed by "they will belong again to the East, to Chesapeake,- to Lords for whom Interests less subjunctive must ever enjoy Priority." Equating eastern commerce with a lack of the subjunctive suggests that the wilderness is the embodiment of the subjunctive (if such a thing were possible) -- ideas, I think, borrowed as much from Turner's "Frontier Theory" as they are from religion. (I'm probably wrong here. I have not read Turner's thesis; I have only read about it -- and a bit of knowledge is....)

For me, this opposition of the subjunctive and "the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia” ties back to the use of "against the Day" on p. 125, which is a more straightforward image: the fog against the daylight suggests oppositional forces and also the literal movement of the fog in the foreground against the daylight in the background (see, too, p. 683, "the Lanthorn against the low-lit Day"). The imagery on this page (p. 125) suggests an ephemeral ghostliness to the fog where anything might happen, against all reason--as opposed to the reasonable light of day.

One last observation: the phrase "sober Day-Light of Philadelphia" (p. 687) rests in a beautiful Platonic-cave image: "Their task has shifted, from a direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain'd thro' twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dixon at the drafting table...." Lovely!



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