M&D Deep Duck Soulless?

[Joseph Tracy]

 Dave, those quotes from the earlier read of M&D are rich, as this quote. There is something simplifying in these searches for transcendent meaning because so frequently what is sought is the confirmation that the love we have experienced is not meaningless, not an illusion, not a disappearing talking dog.  But is love something we see, find, discover, something we make, something that makes us?
  There are many maps. But what is being divided?  

I find the disappearance of the Dog telling.  The duck abides but not the dog. The dog story is its own koan, an invention of language, but reminiscent of many paradoxes, both scientific and metaphysical.
   
 
On Jan 15, 2015, at 10:16 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> "'Peace, Grandam,-- reclaim thy Ort.  The Learned One has yet to sink
> quite that low.'  The Dog, with an expressive swing of his Head, makes
> a dignified Exit, no more than one wag of the Tail per step." (M&D,
> Ch. 3, p. 26)
> 
>> From James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Ed. Christopher
> Hibbert, New York:
> Penguin, 1979 [1791]), "Part IV: 1764-70," pp. 123-54
> 
> "I told him that I had dined lately at [Samuel] Foote's.  'Pray, Sir,
> is not Foote an infidel?' JOHNSON. 'I do not know, Sir, that the
> fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a
> dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the
> subject.'  BOSWELL. 'I suppose, Sir, he has thought superficially, and
> seized the first notions which occured to his mind.'  JOHNSON. 'hy
> then, Sir, still he is like a dog, that snatches the piece next him.
> Did you never observe that dogs have not the power of comparing?  A
> dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both are
> before him.'" (pp. 146-7)
> 
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59965
> 
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Samuel Johnson on a badly-walking-on-two-legs dog: "it is not that he
>> does it badly but that he does it at all'
>> [paraphrase actually, so check out for perfection] in with the
>>> Enlightenment.
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