GR translation: her European darkness

[alice wellintown]

I suspect that one model is Henry Adams, who discovers on the
continent, not only the Virgin, but the darkness there, the so-called
or once called Dark Ages that produced the cathedrals with the works
of hands (Hesiod and Eliot and Smith and Chandler, hands that work and
turn the time and haunt as forces invisible, most of the time), and
then, the books that, as Hugo has it in his famous romance, kill the
cathedrals when texts figuratively and literally cover the churches
with the writings on the wall (prophesying the demise of the Virgin or
her conversion to the dynamo), the trappings of relics and
manufactured disguise, all that survives, as the bad priest.


On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 6:39 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> How does one translate this? This innocent abroad idea, be it Pynchon,
> James, Twain, Melville, countless others...ans how does one translate
> the irony Pynchon loads into this tradition? so Mason and Dixon are,
> as Slothrop is here, a kind of reversal of the concept. Give me a leg
> up on this one. Don't break a leg.
>
>> I agree with all this.  I think also there is the sense of rosy cheeked
>> American youth sent to confront a war in a place so much older, with so much
>> more time to indulge decadence.