V2nd, C3

[Ian Livingston]

Horrors! Now I've gone and left myself too little time again.

A start into section IV, in which Victoria has no explicit role:

Stencil as Waldetar is yet another foreigner in Egypt. The first
matter of significance seems to be the train a la Foerster's car, it
is an emblem of industrialization. It runs "on a different clock--its
own, which no human could read." The inanimate structures of man's
devising have taken on an impetus of their own. Men cannot stop the
machine, or even determine its rate of travel--we serve our inanimate
inventions.

Regarding the story of Ptolemy Philopater, I cannot yet verify
Waldetar's father's telling, but there is Biblical reference to some
events that sound near enough:

1.3.7.        Ptolemy IV Philopater. 3 Maccabees 2:25-30
2:25   When he [Ptolemy IV Philopater] arrived in Egypt, he increased
in his deeds of malice . . . 27  He proposed
to inflict public disgrace upon the Jewish community, and he set up a
stone on the tower in the courtyard with this
inscription:  28  "None of those who do not sacrifice shall enter
their sanctuaries, and all Jews shall be subjected
to a registration involving poll tax and to the status of slaves.
Those who object to this are to be taken by force
and put to death;  29  those who are registered are also to be branded
on their bodies by fire with the ivy-leaf
symbol of Dionysus, and they shall also be reduced to their former
limited status."  30  In order that he might not
appear to be an enemy to all, he inscribed below: "But if any of them
prefer to join those who have been initiated
into the mysteries, they shall have equal citizenship with the
Alexandrians." [RSV]
(More at: http://www.uoregon.edu/~dfalk/courses/ejud/hellenism.htm)

Waldetar strips the myth as best he can and rationalizes a practical
interpretation, the salient point of which becomes, "The storm and
earthquake have no mind. Soul cannot commend no-soul. Only God can."
The relationship between besouled individuals, however, is beyond
God's province: "they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of
virtue. Fortune had saved the Jews in the Hippodrome."

Waldetar thus separates the animate from the inanimate and regards
each in the Hegelian manner to understand the roles of God and man in
myth and miracle, and we, the Stencillian observers get this explicit
insight into Waldetar: "Merely train's hardware for any casual
onlooker, Waldetar in private life was exactly this mist of
philosophy, imagination and continual worry over his several
relationships--not only with God, but also with Nita, with their
children, with his own history." An object to most, Waldetar has a
subjectivity in which Stencil and we get to partake.

I'll have to leave this hanging with Waldetar's secret about
Baedeker's world: "the permanent residents are actually humans in
disguise." That is, men become their inanimate devices.

-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."