Back to AtD. how does TRP feel about railroads? p.930

[Mark Kohut]

In Thoreau's Journal, he captures the fact of a train whistling close enough thru his quiet, peaceful Garden of Eden.
It is felt as a violation. 
 
The Celestial Railroad---Hawthorne
http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/celest.htm

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 4:32 PM
Subject: Re: Back to AtD. how does TRP feel about railroads? p.930

He does like them coffee messes. Notice the one on the list of items
in the crowd here in the passage.  And, so we might revisit that cofee
mess in GR. Or not. He does like these lists and piles of stuff,
layers, palimscests and crowds of folks, mobs, mobbing about, bobbing
about till we run into someone who has some odd reason for being in
this place at this time. A railroad figures large in the American
Mystery (Tanner). The straight line, the time table (Gatsby) vs. the
Circles of Emerson, the flux. Ahab is an iron man, sometimes he is
bronze, but he is set on steel wheels. C.L.R James's book on Moby-Dick
is worth a peek. If you signal up all lines, well, you've now got more
than a foward backward motion, you have an above and a below, and
there is no telling where you might travel. Now, to return to Huck and
Jim after the river raft adventure, you are free to go anywhere, even
to places unknown and unmapped.
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