Word: mason
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Tony Blair is like Bill Clinton [WORLD, April 28]? What's next? Will Blair borrow the fund-raising Lincoln bed for the Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street? DICK MASON Orange, Conn...
...tired of role models' coming from the sports arena. If our future is in the hands of one man's putt, it is a bleak future." KIENEN MASON Baltimore, Maryland...
...fascinating, jittery suspension. He loves the intellectual purities of science and understands them better than any American novelist ever. He also loathes the power that science bestows, since it always ends up in the wrong hands, i.e., those with a hunger for such power. At its most eloquent, Mason & Dixon becomes an epic of loss. The conquering of the wilderness means "reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,--winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair...
Pynchon vividly recounts the dangers and struggles Mason and Dixon endure in carrying out their assignment. And it slowly becomes clear that this story is not about a triumph of 18th century scientific methods, which Pynchon explains in elaborate detail, but rather about a tragic desecration, a deadly abstraction imposed upon land once natural and truly free. Mason and Dixon cannot foresee the bloodshed that will rage across their line a century later, during the U.S. Civil War, but both men, in Pynchon's telling, come to believe that they did something wrong to the wilderness. Years later Mason tells...
...contemporary readers, beguiled by everything electronic, willing to do the hard, head-scratching work that Pynchon's uncompromising prose demands? Perhaps not; tough books are unfashionable at the moment. But those who beg off the long journey through Mason & Dixon will deprive themselves of a unique and miraculous experience...