AtD translation: too fair to be alone, too crazy for town/exploding into the dark

[Mike Jing]

These are enormously helpful. Thanks David.


On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 7:46 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> OK, sorry.  I’m back with a little more sleep and patience than last
> night.  It’s really not so obscure.
>
> As it says, Stray considers herself lucky to have survived to this point
> through lots of dangers.  But she has the humility and bigger perspective
> to feel her luck was bought at the expense of a number of other girls who
> weren’t so lucky, who didn’t survive, “who’d gone down before their time,
> Dixies and
> Fans and Mignonettes”  [names of “types” (stereotypes?) of girls]
>
>  *These generically named Girls, now dead, failed to survive because they
> were:*
>
> 1) “*too fair to be alone*,”  But they *died alone anyway*, because they
> were “too fair to be alone.”  Look up the definition of a “fair” young
> lady, and pick an aspect of that definition that would make her in mortal
> danger if left alone in a dangerous place.  “Weak (physically)” as in “the
> fairer sex,” is the obvious possibility for that word in this context.
>
> 2) “*too crazy for town,*” which implies that her living in that town was
> the cause of death, because her “craziness” put her in some dangerous town
> location or situation that hastened her death.  The possible scenarios are
> endless.
>
> 3) *And other examples and reasons for their deaths*:  “ending their days
> too soon in barrelhouses, in shelters dug not quite deep enough into the
> unyielding freeze of the hillside, for the sake of boys too stupefied with
> their own love of exploding into the dark, . . .”
>
> David Morris
>
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 11:04 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> P651.23-29   . . . yet she couldn’t see her luck as other than purchased
>> in the worn unlucky coin of all those girls who hadn’t kept coming back,
>> who’d gone down before their time, Dixies and Fans and Mignonettes, too
>> fair to be alone, too crazy for town, ending their days too soon in
>> barrelhouses, in shelters dug not quite deep enough into the unyielding
>> freeze of the hillside, for the sake of boys too stupefied with their own
>> love of exploding into the dark, . . .
>>
>> What does "too fair to be alone, too crazy for town" imply here,
>> especially
>> "too crazy for town"? And what does "exploding into the dark" refer to,
>> apart from the obvious?
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>