A Dance to the Music of Time Readalong #dancealong discussion

January 2019: Temporary Kings...

As we come to the end of the series I suppose i was expecting some sort of culmination or resolution but that's not been the way of the books thus far (or of real life). As a result I think i may be a little hard on this episode.
The setting and characters seemed a bit unusually chosen by Powell and i didn't realise until towards the end that it had been all building up to perhaps the most dramatic scene of the series thus far. That this scene was recounted by Nick (who wasn't there) from the different tellings of two of his friends was a fascinating way of doing it and worked very well.
The final chapter, in which we hear obliquely about the dramatic end of a major character, was a bit of a tease and i suspect we may not find out any more in book twelve.
So many minor incidents and characters come back to play large roles and i look forward to revisiting the earlier books with the knowledge of what is to come later.

“Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop;
Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels;
Clouds overcome it;
No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?
Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning.
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
'Ware the beholders!
This is our master, famous, calm and dead,
Borne on our shoulders.”
A Grammarian's Funeral by Robert Browning
This poem, quoted in the novel, is a kind of a key… They’re high on a mountain and looking down…