[ Home | Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Kayte Siegle
T1: itgirl48@hotmail.com
Date: 3/23/98
Time: 9:14:40 AM
Remote Name: 130.68.21.198
I can't help it.
Maybe I am nothing more than a silly product of pop culture, but the whole time I was reading this I was thinking of "Indidana Jones and the Last Crusade", that scene where he's in the library in...um...Venice (I think)? Finding the lost manuscript, for the author, must surely have been a thrilling victory. A fictional victory, to be sure... Even though it reads like a product description in the J. Peterman catalogue.
Anyway.
In my Art of Fiction class, my professor was intent on making us see that things go in a puedulum-like fashion. At one end of the arc, is reason, logic, etc. At the other end is emotion and religion. As time passes, the pendulum swings from extreme to extreme, and it affects culture and popular thought. I think the time period in which the book was written and the time peoriod in which the story was to have taken place are at the same ends of the pendulum's arc. From the 60s to the late 70s was a time of high emotions and chaos. Pehaps not so much religion persay, but high emotions to be sure. The Middle Ages were also a similar time. Religion was at a peak, people were ruled by emotion rather than reason, and logic was kind of taking a backseat to a narrowly cornered chaos.