From: PENI@DENI.COM   
      
   '...Moreland, in a disgruntled moment in Books Do Furnish A Room, attacks   
   the notion of historical exceptionalism. "How bored one gets with the   
   assumption that people now are organically different from people in the   
   past-the Lost Generation, the New Poets, the Atomic Age." A Dance to the   
   Music of Time is, among other things, a spirited affirmation of the   
   immutability of human behavior. In the 1940s J. G. Quiggin edits a left-wing   
   literary journal called Fission; twenty years later his radical daughters   
   start a campus rag called Toilet Paper, which of course horrifies their   
   father. Those who live long enough, like Jenkins, are privileged to watch   
   the drama renew itself and begin all over again. From Hearing Secret   
   Harmonies:   
   While a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of   
   the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has   
   included one's own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous   
   derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have   
   been supposed to have made their final exit. . The touching up of   
   time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains,   
   are none of them uncommon.   
   Thus the mystical activities of Scorpio Murtlock and his cult, in the   
   sequence's last volume, directly echo those of Dr. Trelawney, who flourished   
   during Jenkins's childhood before the First World War: the two even use the   
   same nonsensical formula, "The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the   
   True." Plus ça change, in other words: each generation has its magi, and the   
   basic differences between them are remarkably slight. Perhaps Mrs. Erdleigh   
   is right-as indeed she so often is-when she claims that Death is merely an   
   illusion....'   
      
   http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/sept04/powell.htm   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)