Terrific quotation Martin. Also reads like a preemptive rebuff to pomo
anxiety: underlying order, the first event, are there, even if we may not
divine them.
"It all coheres. You cannot see it. It doesn't matter. You are nothing."
Praise be,
xS
At 01:58 PM 6/17/02, you wrote:
>Sam Brenton wrote: <<Gore Vidal (lazing in his robe on the patio of his
>Ravello palace) wrote
>about how he thought memory was a palimpsest - each memory a memory of a
>memory. Me I don't know, as Julian Jaynes said to Gilgamesh.>>
>"Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain
>softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before.
>And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And, if in the vellum
>palimpsest, lying among the other _diplomata_ of human archives or
>libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as
>oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes,
>having no natural connexion, which by pure accident have consecutively
>occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep
>memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such
>incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man's life, and its external
>shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organizing principles
>which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predeterminate centres,
>whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will
>not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its
>ultimate repose to be troubled, in the retrospect from dying moments, or
>from other great convulsions." (Th. de Quincey: "Suspiria de Profundis",
>_Works_, XIII, pp 346-47). This was ripped off by Hugh MacDiarmid in _In
>Memoriam James Joyce_, p.137, among many other writers; he does add some
>words of his own to his collage, of course, like "I think there should be a
>soul-show/Compulsory for everybody/At least once a year."
>Best
>Martin
Sam Brenton, Educational Technologist
Educational and Staff Development
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS
Tel: 020 7882 5309
Fax: 020 7882 3159
http://www.admin.qmul.ac.uk/staffdev/ltech
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