TRTR - ch 1 afterthought - Lives of Saints? / bull

[Mark Kohut]

M. Bailey writes:
"I mean, religious passions do run high - and so much exposure in those
formative years // also, isn't it kind of weird that his dad segues to
talking about bullfighting when Wyatt finally recovers -- "oh, they
keep the bulls in darkened cells" (like you) "and then they go out in
the sunlight looking so proud and get stabbed in the shoulder" o-;  he
goes on and on about it actually! "

Google book Search thru The Golden Bough informs me that the bull
is a divinity (in many societies) and the bull-god is Dionysious, that
god of exuberant overflowing passion in life............................

which is killed by that life-denying religious upbringing.................





----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, April 21, 2011 7:41:26 PM
Subject: TRTR - ch 1 afterthought - Lives of Saints? / bull

so Wyatt's Aunt May sets him to reading the Lives of Saints?

no, it was the Book of Martyrs by John Foxe, Protestant, but still -
not all that typical 20th Century Protestant childhood reading, or at
least, one might say that the content was not as different from Lives
of Saints as to be completely incompatible with a sort of inculcation
in the miraculous and in religious passion, transcendental throes of
renunciation and rejection, and then he's surrounded by all those
books in the sickroom, too

I mean, religious passions do run high - and so much exposure in those
formative years // also, isn't it kind of weird that his dad segues to
talking about bullfighting when Wyatt finally recovers -- "oh, they
keep the bulls in darkened cells" (like you) "and then they go out in
the sunlight looking so proud and get stabbed in the shoulder" o-;  he
goes on and on about it actually!









-- 
"...seems the simplest things are hardest to explain" - Dave Mason