THEN: What are the odds that Mr. W. might akshully say the unspeakable?

Oh, I think we both know that whereof he could not speak he would perforce pass over in silence.

Lest I be imagined to parade about in borrowed academic finery, and not my autodidact's motley, I should explain that my tagline is more than anything else a tribute to a piece of intellectual overreach from my distant youth, a memory of a sunny afternoon 30+ years ago when I retired silent upon a peak in Darien--or at least a windswept wooded hillside on the north end of Monterey Bay--with a knapsack, a blanket, a bottle of plonk and a not illiberal dose of a then-popular Swiss-formulated ergot alkaloid derivative, and proceeded (once the little telltale thunk in the frontal lobes and slight onset of queasiness signalled that the roller coaster had left the platform and begun its climb) to read my trusty Tractatus from cover to cover. And, oh my, my auditors!--it all made glorious sense that afternoon. The passages of logical notation (which I believe Nabokov had in mind when, in a passage I thought I remembered from Ada but have just now failed to retrieve, he spoke of philosophical tomes "erupting into formulas and equations that blind one's brain," or words to better effect) this time readily yielded up their sense as I raced through the tome, uncovering progressively deeper, more complex levels of meaning; profundities that had eluded the best exegesists of the previous half century stood revealed to me (take that, Liz Anscombe! Take that, Rush Rhees!), and I grokked, o lordie how I grokked what Douglas Adams had not yet thought to call Life, the Universe and Everything...

What was actually happening, as anyone will know who has played with these compounds, is that the alkaloid was overclocking my pattern-recognition circuitry way past its operating tolerances--I probably could have read the facing German pages instead and still been, for that hour or two, the foremost Wittgenstein scholar of my day--and of course the hidden meanings evaporated as I hiked back to the dorm. I'm put in mind of an account I once read (almost certainly derived from William James, but a couple of generations of paraphrase removed at the time I encountered it) about a writer who, under the influence of a powerful unnamed intoxicating agent received a world-shattering revelation which, with considerable effort, he contrived to commit to paper. Upon recovering his wits he read: "There's a funny smell in the room."

--This by way of returning to topic: It's now Year Three of the Usurpation, and there's a funny smell in the country. Indeed, some of our friends have begun to remark upon it.

cordially,

North end of the Bay would be Seaside? Fort Ord?

Ah, that would be the north end of the peninsula. For the north end of the bay, cast your eyes up to the university town at the end of Highway 17.

cordially,