From: "daniel haines" <daniel-AT-machine75.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: a really long shot
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 17:38:17 +0100


hi michael,

many many thanks for these passages which answer my doubt
without effecting my argument! - in all respects, an ideal
conclusion... ;-)  --i just wanted to be sure exactly how
far i was pushing it before standing up and doing so in
front of others; and, with only a week in which to conjure
up something presentable, the alternative of an
inter-library loan would have taken too long to be useful...

        ... hoarser ... apish ... unbearably shrill ... he
muttered ... he
        whispered ... : it is by headlong flight that things
progress
        and signs proliferate.  Panic is creation ...

> "Alasca" isn't featured in Lovecraft either, as far as I'm
aware (although there's a passing > reference to Alaska in
"On the Mountains of Madness").

Perhaps an allusion to Nietzsche? -

"- He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows
that it is an air of the heights, a robust air.  One has to
be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will
catch cold.  The ice is near, the solitude is terrible - but
how peacefully all things lie in the light! how freely one
breathes! how much one feels beneath one! -Philosophy, as I
have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living
in ice and high mountains - a seeking after everything
strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto
been excommunicated by morality. " (EH)

"the modern historian has a sad harsh stare, a stare that
looks _beyond_, like that of a lonely arctic explorer...
There is nothing here but snow; all life is hushed." (GM)

ditto for  the "poison garden"? "I narrowed the problem
down; the answers grew into new questions, investigations,
suppositions, probabilities, until I had staked off at last
my own domain, a whole hidden, growing and blooming world,
secret gardens as it were, of whose existence no one must
have an inkling. " (GM).  Or is that in Lovecraft?  I
haven't checked out the Lovecraftian elements yet.

If not there, then perhaps 'Alasca' is to be found in
Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'?  ["You hear that?  It's an animal's
voice." (ATP, p.72)  ] but i haven't read that recently
enough to know.

Incidentally, if you haven't read it, I recommend Jules
Verne's _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_ in relation to
this plateau here's a quick sample:

"I lost myself in that wonderful ecstasy produced by great
peaks. I forgot who I was and where I was, living the life
of the elves and sylphs of Scandinavian mythology.  In fact,
I was intoxicated by the pleasure of altitude, oblivious to
the abysses into which my fate was shortly going to plunge
me."

...contrary to what one might expect, there's a lot of this
sort of thing!  plus what is surely the most Nietzschean
line ever written by anyone other than Nietzsche? -

'Look,' he said, 'and look hard! You must take lessons in
abysses.'

again, with sincerest thanks -
dan
----------
"A great problem, deserving acute attention.
 I solved it by turning out the lights and going
to bed."                 - John Fante, Ask The Dust