AtD translation: atonement

[Michael Bailey]

P688.7-14   The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to
re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become once more
able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass,
eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar,
which is an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes
through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction. . .
.” He paused at the door. “Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the
journey. Do have something to eat, there’s a good chap.”

In what sense is "atonement" used here?



Hmm - good question.
Just to ramble on about context might be helpful & fun - Context is Lew
just realized that Neville and Nigel are only pretending to be idiots &
that they know that Werfner and Renfrew are the same person, bilocating.

Lew realizes that a lot of the Twits know this. Miffed at being left out.

Spends the day in the Twit library stacks reading up on bilocation.

Talks with Dr Ghloix, a Swiss alienist he met in the Twit mess-hall (!) who
mollifies him by saying it’s traditional for people not to learn stuff
until they’re ready for it.

He characterizes Werfner- Renfrew as
“afflicted … by a deep and fatal contradiction—deeper than consciously he
can appreciate, and
as a result the conflict has no other place to go but outward, ejected into
the outside world, there to be carried out as what technically we call
Schicksal—Destiny—with the world around him now obliged to suffer the
disjunction in himself which he cannot, must not, admit . . . so pretending
to be two ‘rivals’ representing the interests of two ‘separate nations’
which are much more likely secular expressions of a rupture within a single
damaged soul.”


Lew then lights a Welsbach unit (lantern using rare earth wick - Welsbach
company is still around) sitting on the table, as night falls.

https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/hliewun


The Cohen brings him some vegetarian supper, and to Lew’s lantern light he
adds greatly by having Lew help him light up a ceiling lighting arrangement

(“…Plafond Lumineux, a modern mixed arrangement of gas-mantles and electric
incandescent bulbs arching across the entire library ceiling and covered by
a pale translucent canopy of some proprietary celluloid which smoothed
these sources, when at last they had all been lit, into a depthless dome of
light somehow much brighter than their sum.“)


- which is a little reminiscent of the light in the pool area of the
Deseret in BE -

- and also, the guru aspect of adding light

Then the Cohen, shedding more intellectual light, on the subject of light -


“Of course it helps to have some allegiance to light.”  “How’s that?”

“As if imparting a secret Lew could not help thinking he had somehow,
without knowing how, become ready to hear, the Cohen said, “We are light,
you see, all of light—we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of
the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at
the high city window, the stars and nebulæ in full midnight glory, the
rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the
costermonger’s barrow. . . . When we lost our æthereal being and became
embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to”—grabbing each side of his
face and wobbling it back and forth—“this. The soul itself is a memory we
carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first
step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction,
that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will,
through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk
being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in
crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering
dimensions, and creating double refraction. . . .” He paused at the door.
“Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey. Do have something
to eat, there’s a good chap.”


Which is a nice speech; and isn’t it kind of similar to the credo at that
convent Cyprian joins?

But as to “atonement” - could the Cohen be referring back to Lew’s original
“upstate-downstate” guilt in Chicago?
Major guru action: foretelling an eventual solution, if Lew cleaves to the
path and progresses, for problems the guy himself has forgotten about.

Anyhoo, that’s my analysis.
Urinalysis may differ (-;