Starting on Raintree County, Part 3 1-16-2021

 And I offer this example of time put forth by the novel (the him being the protagonist, John Shawnessy):

Then it seemed to him that only through a weakness of the will is the past relinquished. A human life had a dimension that wasn't perfectly understood. In this dimension, the whole river of one's life existed all at once, a legendary symbol written across the face of time. And the source of the river was in the gulf to which it flowed as well as the spring from which it rose...

Raintree County (Houghton, Mifflin, 1948), p. 737

I read in these sentence Albert Einstein and William James and James Joyce and William Faulkner and Marcel Proust.  That paragraph concludes with a reference to a physical entrapment of the pst; in context it refers specifically to the antebellum South:

...And if one were to understand the enigma of a twisted life on the land, where would one begin except in a daguerrotypal flowing past a daguerrotypal house?

Raintree County is not a Northern version of Gone with the Wind. It is an antidote to Gone with the Wind. Raintree County hews closer to William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! as slavery/racism as a form of mental illness. Raintree County goes further than Faulkner's novel by being clear how racism drove a major character into insanity; an insanity that included the destroying of her own child.

To be continued.

sch