Emily & Tom

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"The fact that she was a recluse does not make her any less a product of
her culture, as being reclusive does not mean being totally sealed off
from the world."

(Fred D. White: Approaching Emily Dickinson. Critical Currents and
Crosscurrents since 1960. Rochester, NY 2008: Camden House, p. 107)

KFL

"To the current Slothrop's grandfather Frederick (d. 1933), who in typically
sarcasm and guile bagged his epitaph from Emily Dickinson, without a credit
line:

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me

Each one in turn is paying his debt to nature due and leaving the excess to
the next link in the name's chain. They began as fur traders, cordwainers,
salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen,
builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble. Country for miles around gone to
necropolis, gray with marble dust, dust that was the breaths, the ghosts of
all those fake-Athenian monuments going up elsewhere the republic. Always
elsewhere. The money seeping its way out through stock portfolios more
intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland
whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper ---
toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint --- a medium or ground for shit, money,
and the Word. They were no aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social
Register or the Somerset Club --- they carried on their enterprise in silence,
assimilated in life to the dynamic that surrounded them thoroughly as in death they
would be to churchyard earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths,
powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to
the country's fate.
But they did not prosper ... about all they did was persist --- though it all began
to go sour for them around the time Emily Dickinson, never far away, was writing:

Ruin is formal, devil's work,
Consecutive and slow --
Fail in an instant no man did,
Slipping is crash's law,

still they would keep on." (Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 27-8)

PS: Guess it's the first time I realized that "But they did not prosper ... about
all they did was persist" is another hidden Rilke quote, actually from REQUIEM [1908]:

"Wer spricht von Siegen? Überstehen ist alles."

See the punchline of: http://www.rilke.de/gedichte/fuer_wolf_graf_von_kalckreuth.htm

Who speaks of winning? Persisting is all --