… For those taken aback by the tone of midnight's report
on the death of a 1960's counterculture figure.
See Didion's view of the counterculture in her classic
Slouching Towards Bethlehem .
A search in this journal for Didion + Nihilism yields …
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From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117: … in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer … A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
