Subject
Re: sharks, islands & Robinsons in Ada
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Date
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A. Sklyarenko: "...she [Aqua] saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea, before booming back to Seattle or Wark. (1.3)"
Jansy Mello: The complete set of lines of the patriotic song "America, the Beautiful" not only carries "from sea to shining sea" (which I always connected to VN's "dark to shining sea") but also a reference to "pilgrim feet... a thoroughfare of freedom beat"*
excerpt:
".............................
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
................................"
Wikipedia, from where I copied the 1913 version of Katherine Lee's lyrics, also informs: "From sea to shining sea", originally used in the charters of some of the English Colonies in North America, is an American idiom meaning from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean (or vice versa)....A term similar to this is the Canadian motto A Mari Usque Ad Mare ("From sea to sea.")]
btw: There is a reference to Cortez in Pale Fire (in the lines about "Chapman's homer", indicating John Keats's poem ) when, through him, the poet's imagination carries him over to reach the Pacific Ocean, unlike the geography of Homer's travels which, I think, were limited to the Atlantic - a poetic feat that dispenses telescopes, ships and airplanes...
MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
(On First Looking into Chapman's Homer)
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
* I checked BB's Ada Online but found no reference to this song. 21.17: through black ether: a concept of nineteenth-century physics in the midst of these visions of twentieth-century technology.
21.18-19: back to Seattle or Wark: Seattle, Washington, and not Wark, a village in Northumberland on the Scottish border, but a version of Newark, New Jersey--the western and eastern coasts of the United States, therefore--with a bizarre echo of "back to . . . work." The "New" of the real Newark is eliminated here, as if to compensate for Ada's adding a "New Cheshire" to the United States or matching the suppression of the name of New York for "Manhattan." MOTIF: transatlantic doubling.
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