V2nd - Chapter 9 - a sentence that would not fit on Twitter

[Michael Bailey]

eenhyeh, it's just a great frickin' sentence...


"If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again,
he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of
picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best
furious and nostalgic..."

-- starting the marathon with but a single step...

Conditional beginning: If, he says -- if such a season as the Great Rebellion
(now he's calling it the Great Rebellion, why not the Wonderful Rebellion?)
(anyway, noted that it's pretty important to him)
should ever come to him again...

--- a) memories of the Great Rebellion are tied up with his youth
     b) he, like most of us, cherishes the notion that something of
that time could recur

poor bastard (one might think, from a pharisaic moral equine altitude)
- his nostalgia for his youth is tied up with this horrible slave
trade

so, If (as we may have mentioned once before) such a time should
happen to recur...

it would not be a montage!  ("personal random array of picaresque acts
he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and
nostalgic" ???? what is furious and nostalgic here -- the later years?
his mood as he recalls and celebrates? or (long shot) the picaresque
acts themselves???)

I get the sense that he is back then guessing (knowing) how it will be
to look back on all this

but that is just an implication of the main thrust of his thought
(he's really thrusting his thought powerfully at this juncture) which
is that such a wild time will and shall indeed come again

--- and in fact, the siege party is probably intended to be thought
about by an intelligent reader, as such a later wild time -- and the
elder Foppl presiding over it is indeed not montaging romantically as
his younger self, the best he can do is strangely attract Mondaugen's
fever dreams to the earlier time

So, my takeaway at this point:
poor bugger spent his youth on the Bondel Rebellion, actually spent
his life repressing slaves, and it's never the same as that first time

--- Here is the best place to wonder: is this just Foppl, or is this
Mondaugen dreaming what Foppl must've thought back then? ---

regardless, I know this much is true: Mondaugen's youth like Foppl's
is being left behind him at the rate of (as somebody famous once said)
one hour per hour, and he will never again attend a decadent house
party quite the same way

but later in life - the implication might be - he will attend the
decky-dance that is the weapons trade in the good old USA

and what of the reader: I will never again read V. with the fresh and
unschooled eyes that I looked out from in 1970!