AtD: Lew's experience of grace

[Michael Bailey]

 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> "One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself
> on a public
> conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular ["soft eyes", as
> they call it in The
> Wire.kfl], when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of
> having sought
> [As A.C. has it: "Don't lust after results!".kfl], which he later came to
> think of as grace. (...)
> Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed
> in dreams,
> nor easily attributed to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light
> Chicago." (p. 42)
>
> How representative is Lew's experience for AtD's overall concept of "grace"?
>
> Kai
>
>

there's a lot that could be said about that:

Eliot's return to the place and knowing it for the first time;

the arrival of all the major characters at something similar - one
could argue...;

young Jess's capture of the essence of America (is it a version of the
same grace?);

an eschewing of a certain type of pat resolutions (Basnight's own
mysterious transgressions, never detailed, his penance not something
that can be understood, Yashmeen's long quest for the zeta blooming
only briefly into a conjecture in someone else's mind, Frank even
after finding revenge unsatisfactory still engaging in wholesale
violence of the type one might expect of Reef, and Reef with all his
determined badassery becoming somewhat domesticated; Merle becoming
the apotheosis of techne but somehow still full of melancholy soul and
fatherly love?)

surrounded by a luminosity new to him - is this anything like the
white light Doc Sportello is to surround himself with in IV?


-- 
"Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind.  The
second is to be kind.  And the third is to be kind." - Henry James