More Education influence on TRP, maybe

[alice wellintown]

My guess is that P read some and maybe all of The Education when he
was  20-something; maybe he read it for a course at Cornell, maybe for
some other reason. Adams's critique of formal education does fit the
wandering scholars (helen waddell) idea that P discusses in Slow
Learner Inro. and the on the road energy of the early counter-cultural
impulses as discussed during the VL readings and readings of K Sales's
SDS (how labor, a theme here in V., fails to counter the mechanical
forces and how the hardhats and hippies & Co. fail to stop American
Military industrial Complex Imperialism and the bomb) and the medieval
themes and humanist themes of both Adams's most important chapters
(eg.,Dynamo and Virgin) and his study of the Virgin Cathedrals.

Mark mentioned the Buddhist connection and I will not belabor this
point since I've discussed it at some leangth, but the Catholic &
Buddhist connection is quite important.  The "Buddhist"  memorial for
Henry's Clover is worth looking at. In any event, how deep young P
read Adams is open to debate. My experience teaching the work to young
people suggests that most don't like Henry, although they do like his
negative attitude, his aloof wanderings, his, "this is all BS and
meaningless" statements and, smart young people, remember, his mantra:
"this is all WASTE."

In any event, even if young Tom read only half a dozen chapters of The
Education, he also read Eliot's Wasteland and Hemingway's A Farewell
to Arms and Conrad and Melville. From these, it seems, and I owe a big
big debt to Dwight Eddins here, he formulated, what one critic calls,
a grim pheonix (who is that critic?).

OK, back to V.