Slow Learner Intro

[Mark Kohut]

Matthew Arnold — 'Wandering between two worlds, one dead/The other
powerless to be born
I would bet you that TRP came across these very famous words by Matthew
*Arnold *
*as he got his Victorian Literature education. I got them at a school [U of
Toronto] semi-modeled on the canonical English syllabus that was/had been
institutionalized *
*at Pynchon's Cornell. Was rampant. For me, same year I was led to discover
Eliot, pervasive, of course, because Nobel and influence. We know Pynchon
was influenced by him. *

*And/or we know from the Slow Learner introduction that he read The
Education*
*of Henry Adams early in his young adulthood. THE man who lived out the
couplet, **complaining every page. *

*Reread that Intro and focus on how it can be seen as 'the dead, eternal
Eisenhower years vs. the borning--in P's life--of new **worlds. The
stylistic break-thru writers; the *
*Chicago vs Big Table schism; Evergreen mag vs dead world of
academe; literature vs. *
*the Navy (real life). *

*A---and, just to extend the meanings of my recent favorite ending **in
literature....*
*isn't this a foreecho of the auction that ends The Crying of Lot 49? *
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