Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[Michael Bailey]

 alice wellintown wrote:

>Would that a reader understand not drugs and the foolishness of
>youthful experiements that crack and chip away at the indoctrinated
>exceptionalisms and predjudicial pedantries of the privleged college
>crew who may choose to discover the class issue in their own slow
>learner yarns by jolly jack tarrying, wondering in the towers of
>scholars, touring the ghetto, chatting with volubtuous feminist, and
>reading Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience

long as it is, that's still a sentence fragment.
I'm tempted to doctor it up, because I like where I think it's headed:

"Would that a reader understand that Pynchon's fictions are about
not drugs but about the foolishness..."   would that be an acceptable
interpolation after "Would that"?

or, "Would that a reader understand not drugs [et al]...but instead
the sensuous convolutions of prose, the reactions to poets and thinkers
and other novelists, the observations of daily life, the savoring of experience,
and the essential good-heartedness that shines through all of his work!"
Would that be a reasonable completion of the sentence that begins with
"Would that"?
-- 


- "The whole point of life is to have a story" - Jeremy Cioara