Exacting Sun: Multi-lapsing or Intellectual Promiscuity?

"Then they would all go outside to lie in the sun, and no one would speak. Man diminishes man's powers. The world leaves them intact. Rose, Claire, Catherine, and Patrice lived, at the windows of their house, on images and appearances, consented to a kind of game they played with each other, receiving with laughter, friendship, and affection alike but returning to the dance of the sea and sky, rediscovering the secret color of their fate and finally confronted with the deepest part of . Gula would creep out, perpetually offended, a black question mark with green eyes, slender and delicate, suddenly seized by a fit of madness and pouncing on shadows" (88).

"What she had really wanted to talk about to Robert Duncan, however, that night in Melbourne when he indicated so firmly that whatever she offered did not interest him, was not girls visited by gods but the much rarer phenomenon of men condescended to by goddesses. Anchises, for instance, lover of Aphrodite and father of Aeneas. One would have thought that, after that unforeseen and unforgettable episode in his hut on Mount Ida, Anchises -- a good-looking boyo, if one is to believe the hymn , but otherwise just a cattle herder -- would have wanted to talk about nothing else, to whoever would listen: how he had fucked a goddess, the most succulent in the whole stable, fucked her all night long, got her pregnant too.

Men and their leering talk. She has no illusions about how mortal beings treat whatever gods, true or feigned, ancient or modern, have the misfortune to fall into their hands. She thinks of a film she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn't: Jessica Lange playing a Hollywood sex goddess who has a breakdown and ends up in the common ward of a madhouse, drugged, lobotomized, strapped to her bed, while orderlies sell tickets for ten minutes a time with her. ' I wanna fuck a movie star!' pants one of their customers, shoving his dollars at them. In his voice the ugly underside of idolatry: malice, murderous resentment. Bring an immortal down to earth, show her what life is really like, bang her till she is raw. Take that ! Take that! A scene they excised from the televised version, so close to the bone of America does it cut" (184-185).

"...It is the meagerness of Christian feeling that disconcerts me, their rejection of this world in favor of a next which is -- to be tactful -- not entirely certain. Finally, one must oppose them because of their intellectual arrogance, which seems to me often like madness. We are told that there is only one way, one revelation: theirs. Nowhere in their tirades and warnings can one find the modesty or wisdom of a Plato, or that pristine world of flesh and spirit Homer sang of. From the beginning, curses and complaints have been the Christian style, inherited from the Jews, whose human and intellectual discipline is as admirable as their continuing bitterness is limiting and blighting" (384 ).