I don’t have any ideas on how Dominion might relate to the housing crisis yet, but I’m finding this book to be interesting in other ways. It is certainly a slow read; long and heavy. However, I do enjoy the language. It’s wonderful overall, but every so often there’s a moment when I pause and reread a piece of the language I especially like. It’s like finding little treasures scattered throughout the book.
I’ve noticed that Baker’s descriptions of time are regularly different from (what one may consider) “the norm.” This fact further grabbed my interest after Friday’s discussion on the name Chronos having a connection to time. As one site (I’ll attach the link below) describes the Greek god as being “the personification of time.” What I mean by Baker’s way of describing time is the visual side of it – morning or night time, light vs. dark. On page 86 (at the beginning of “age of fire”) he writes, “When [Purchase] arrived back in town it was morning on the clock but not yet in the world.” I thought this was an interesting way of saying that it was dark and early without saying “it was dark and early.” There are other points I’ve noticed how he phrases the time of day, such as the “thumbnail of a sun” on page 90. (Out of curiosity, has anyone ever seen Angels in the Outfield? This one line just made me think of how a kid – I forget his name – in the film points at a crescent moon and says, “Look! It’s God’s thumbnail!” By no means related to what I was going with here, but I had to bring it up.)
On a final note, I believe there was also a line in A Mercy or one of the other books we’ve read that was similar to the kinds Baker writes in Dominion. I think it was a line that stood out to someone in class as it was being read out loud, and they pointed out how they liked the wording. I’ll have to look for it in the book again. I’ll come back to this if I find it (unless someone else remembers?).
Link to where I found the first quote:
https://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Primordial/Chronos/chronos.html