Bact to AtD. Frank. Meteorites

[alice wellintown]

It seems obvious to me. The meteor-man, the train....these allusions
here are as obvious to me as those in V..

It is, once again, parody.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1969/nov/06/history-and-henry-adams-ii/?pagination=false

http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/adamsaccel08.htm

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> well, maybe..very subtextually....
>
>
>
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> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2013 1:20 PM
> Subject: Re: Bact to AtD. Frank. Meteorites
>
> It is an allusion to Henry Adams:
>
>
> XXXV
> Nunc Age (1905)
>
>
> NEARLY forty years had passed since the ex-private secretary landed at
> New York with the ex-Ministers Adams and Motley, when they saw
> American society as a long caravan stretching out towards the plains.
> As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904, an older man than
> either his father or Motley in 1868, he found the approach more
> striking than ever,—wonderful—unlike anything man had ever seen,—and
> like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the city
> became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning.
> Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its
> freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone
> and steam against the sky. The city had the air and movement of
> hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and
> alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.
> Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man,
> speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
> irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York
> was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into
> corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times
> the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom they
> were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements
> or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand,
> for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his
> failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal
> election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked
> out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt
> himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious
> of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive
> whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
> two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
> Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.
>
>
> [...]
>
> In that, or any other case, a nineteenth-century education was as
> useless or misleading as an eighteenth-century education had been to
> the child of 1838; but Adams had a better reason for holding his
> tongue. For his dynamic theory of history he cared no more than for
> the kinetic theory of gas; but, if it were an approach to measurement
> of motion, it would verify or disprove itself within thirty years. At
> the calculated acceleration, the head of the meteor-stream must very
> soon pass perihelion. Therefore, dispute was idle, discussion was
> futile, and silence, next to good-temper, was the mark of sense. If
> the acceleration, measured by the development and economy of forces,
> were to continue at its rate since 1800, the mathematician of 1950
> should be able to plot the past and future orbit of the human race as
> accurately as that of the November meteoroids.