Dear List and SES ...
Jerry Friedman:["Yewshade, in another, higher
state"] It never occurred to me that
"higher" could mean "north of". I took it to be "higher in altitude", that
is, in the Western mountains.
Mary Krimmel: "Higher" could also mean higher. For example, Colorado is higher
than Massachusetts; the lowest point in Colorado has a higher altitude than the
highest point in Massachusetts.
Jansy
Mello: "Higher state" could also mean higher state: not a
geographyc location but a spiritual one.
Jerry Friedman: [John Morris: I do think it was a
masterstroke on VN's part to unsettle the entire geography of the novel]
It's also another of the reminders that you're reading
fiction.
Jansy Mello: Fiction is not simply "fictional", it
may carry all the seriousness of any real game in which the moves
have a reality and "effectuality" of their own.
When we read VN's paragraph in ADA: It was
owing[...]to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that
minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a
fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it
in support and token of their own irrationality [...] Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of
another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’
but with the Real World in us and beyond us" it is possible to notice the
establishment of definite sets of alternatives ( "either, or"):
(a)
minds bien rangés= Terra as a fad or fantom
x deranged minds= Terra accepted in support of their own
irrationality;
(b)Terra
(another world) = "Other World" x "Next
World" (sick minds)
(c)Terra
(another world) x "Real World" ( sick
minds).
Item
(a): are there other options besides these two ( "well-arranged"
and "deranged" minds) with which we got stuck as our instruments to
situate "Terra"?
We
know what VN defined as "common-sense" (well-arranged) and "art" (certainly
not "deranged"); As for items (b)
and (c) they inform us only about what "sick minds" see and
understand, but there are implied references to philosophical
"realistic", "empirical", "idealistic", "spiritualistic" ways
to explore the "external/internal" worlds .