M&D Deep Duck Ch. 3: Innocent merriment

[msacha1121 at gmail.com]

So many suggestions of death in this section, popping up amidst otherwise lighthearted scenes of pre-departure. Tyburn can probably be attributed to mood, but there's a lot to do with the sense of passage and the significance of getting back from the traverse - Mason, in the company of Hepsie, is eager to reach his late wife but not to stay there. Pirate ships are "Bullies (that) shift about in the dark", but it isn't the French at the helm of boats that "wait with muffl'd Oars to ferry them against their will over to a Life they may not return from." The principle word here, I think, being "may".


> On Jan 12, 2015, at 3:14 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Life Against Death....and Dixon fearing he is unfit for being with
> others in public.
> 
> Then, related, Mason's Puritanism sees joke-telling Dixon as perhaps
> dicey to be in public with.
> 
> a lot in its way....major contrasting temperaments and each seeing a
> different public self.
> has to lead someplace in the book.........
> 
>> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 3:05 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think the implication is that Mason's grieving has brought on a
>> depression, generating a morbid fascination with death. I don't know how
>> much deeper one could examine this.
>> 
>> David Morris
>> 
>>> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 15.10: "Mason explains, though without his precise reason for it, that,
>>> for the past Year or more, it has been his practice to attend the Friday
>>> Hangings at that melancholy place ..." (Tyburn)
>>> 
>>> Anybody care to venture a "precise reason"? This first meeting is in 1760
>>> or 1761, so his habit might date to his wife Rebekah's death in 1759
>>> (although later we'll get reasons to think he had tended to the
>>> Melancholick well before that). And yes, the Tyburn hangings were an
>>> acknowledged Sight of London.
>>> 
>>> Is that enough to explain it? Mason is rather gentle, neither sadistic nor
>>> vindictive; I for one don't see an obvious or direct connection between
>>> mouning and a desire to watch excutions.
> -
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