Re: GR translation: at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t leave
Mark Kohut
mark.kohut at gmail.com
Thu Mar 3 07:21:47 CST 2016
And isn't this a sublime piece of writing, utterly sublime?
At Test Stand VII, the "holy place" of The Rocket and that image at once.
On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 4:21 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:
> V725.1-19, P739.12-31 How did you feel about the old Rocket? Not now
> that it’s giving you job security, but back then—do you remember any more
> what it was like wheeling them out by hand, a dozen of you that morning, a
> guard of honor in the simple encounter of your bodies with its inertia . .
> . all your faces drowning in the same selfless look—the moires of
> personality softening, softening, each sweep of surf a little more out of
> focus till all has become subtle grades of cloud—all hatred, all love,
> wiped away for the short distance you had to push it over the winter berm,
> aging men in coatskirts flapping below your boottops, breaths in white
> spouts breaking turbulent as the waves behind you . . . . Where will you
> all go? What empires, what deserts? You caressed its body, brute, freezing
> through your gloves, here together without shame or reticence you twelve
> struggled, in love, on this Baltic shore—not Peenemünde perhaps, not
> official Peenemünde . . . but once, years ago . . . boys in white shirts
> and dark vests and caps . . . on some beach, a children’s resort, when we
> were younger . . . at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t
> leave—the way the wind smelled salt and dying, the sound of winter surf,
> the premonition of rain you could feel at the back of your neck, stirring
> in the clipped hairs . . . . At Test Stand VII, the holy place.
>
> I can't quite parse this sentence:
>
> . . . at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t leave—
>
> How should it be read?
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160303/54b534fe/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list