Still, Against the Day

[Mark Kohut]

One can play and explore AtD intellectually, relentlessly,  especially if
one knows the rest of his work,
as readers say of* Finnegans Wake* and as I have only experienced similarly
with Shakespeare.

The readers, scholars, play-goers and actors who find S's internal themes
and their connections;
the 400 years of finding scraps of phrases from Plutarch/Ovid/ Montaigne;
sources of his penetrating
insights, allusions and natural observation and more.

I'm not gonna be the one to try to compare TRP to Shakey, not capable, an
unreliable 'critic' in this regard,
 but I can say the above feelings---the intellectual play, the variety of
annotatable meanings, the rich ambiguities
come out every reread. New perspectives open always. My projections or
lively footnotes, I'm not the judge, just the messenger.

While in this reread, I say I could do half a dozen posts a day IF
ONLY.....have to read so slow it becomes like a huge pop-up book
full of connections.


Anyway, Why is F.J. Turner's frontier thesis part of the story [at all] and
where it is in AtD? Part of P's vision of when America,
an 'ideal' [-enough] America existed? When Jeffersonian yeoman farmers in
close-knit communities had an organic connection to
Life Itself, so to get Burkean? [both of them]. The American equivalent of
what TRP will later seem to say about Olde European villages?

Notice this from Professor Vanderjuice: "the Frontier ends and
disconnection begins. Cause and effect? How the dickens do I know?"
'Disconnection' that word to describe the problem of modernity by many.