Re: GR translation: at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn’t leave

[Mike Jing]

Indeed it is.

Thanks, Jochen and Mark.

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 8:21 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/20160304/28578daa/attachment.html>