Scene 035: marathe steeply temple

• p. 105: Steeply transfixed by the Tucson vista "in a kind of torpid spectation"; the Tine-Luria love floated as ballad material (Tristan and Isolde, "Agamemnon and Helen").
• p. 105: Marathe's counter-list (Narcissus and Echo, Kierkegaard and Regina, Kafka and the postbox girl); then the eruption — "Take off your wig and be shitting inside it... And you mean Paris. Helen and Paris."
• p. 105: Steeply's Trojan riff: "The horse: the gift which was not a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the door. The sack of Troy from inside." — the samizdat-by-mail allegorized in passing, by the man hunting it.
• pp. 105-106: Troy materialism: the war was for Dardanelles tolls; "The one-quotes 'love'... merely was the excuse"; Steeply's baiting idiocy ("Did that war even really take place?") flagged as interview technique.
• p. 106: Tine who "would die twice for her" without thinking — and that tragic transcendence is exactly why Gentle keeps trusting him; Marathe (whose own betrayal is for his wife): the insane are not responsible; choosers are.
• pp. 106-107: Etymology of fanatic — "worshipper at the temple"; attachment as worship; "Choose your attachments carefully"; persons vs. nation/cause as objects worth dying for; Steeply's cruel aside — "How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?"; "Ohh… Canada…."
• p. 107: The thesis: "You are what you love... what you would die for without... thinking twice"; the challenge — "You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?"; the A.F.R. file's answer-by-dossier: recent divorce; the fanatically beloved aspirin-ad sedan somewhere below (n.44: 'technical interviews' = involuntary interrogation, w/ or w/o physical inducements — Steeply's silences are field-grade technique).
• pp. 107-108: "Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple?... what is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Québecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?"; Steeply: what if the temple comes to Mohammed — "What if you just love?"
• p. 108: Marathe's verdict: temple of self and sentiment, "kneeling to yourself"; "the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs."
• p. 108: Marathe's own coinage leaks: the unchosen lover is "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost" — reaching for the tragic vocabulary his doctrine just forbade ("Not tragic. No songs"); also the creosote smell "much less strongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range."
• pp. 108-109: Silences as technique; black-widow webs under the outcroppings; Marathe's "victory over the train that had taken his legs" (n.45 → note 304: le jeu du prochain train — full treatment at scene n304); the anthem attempt; the radiant-heat "astral spacesuit of warmth"; the A.F.R.'s four-Quonset base like the surface of the moon, "hell-stench inside the empty rooms."
• p. 109: Serial tail (restored from raw 036's head in reconciliation): Steeply saying nothing, tamping another Belgian cigarette; Marathe humming the U.S.A. song "all over the map in terms of key."

Backward

• Marathe's own rhetoric leaks (p. 108, "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost") — in-scene textual evidence for the connection above that he argues against the only choice he actually made.

Forward

• Marathe's "choose your attachments carefully" is the book's master key: it glosses Mario's chocolate-flavor prudence (scene 026, p. 85), Hal's vows (scene 023, p. 67), Kate Gompert's center-of-my-life Bob Hope (scene 024, p. 76), the attaché's recliner (scenes 025/028), and — affirmatively — AA's instruction to hand your will to something bigger (Gately's arc): the Crocodiles teach what Marathe says no one teaches.
• "The slave who believes he is free": the addiction thesis verbatim — anticipates the cage/Bottom material and Gately's "Substance" theology (pp. 200+, scene 056; pp. 343+, scene 074); also the Entertainment's victims, who choose their master with perfect contentment.
• Marathe's own exception haunts the speech: he betrayed nation for wife (n.42, scene 031) — he argues against the only choice he has actually made; later installments (notably pp. 776+ on his wife) keep this wound open, and Steeply's "How are your wife and kids" shows he knows it.
• n.45/n.39's train material: le jeu du prochain train (n.304) — the A.F.R.'s initiation by wheelchair-making train-jumping; "his victory over the train" is Marathe's credential and maiming in one phrase.
• The temple question returns at every subsequent Marathe/Steeply installment (pp. 318, scene 072+, 422+, 527+, 638+) and is answered in counterpoint by Mario's earnestness and the Ennet House clichés-that-work — the irony-sincerity thread's two poles are both in this scene (Schtitt, Marathe).
• The gift-that-was-not-a-gift triangle (Carlisle's figure): the Trojan horse (p. 105) ↔ the Entertainment arriving by anonymous mail "Out of the blue" (pp. 89-90, scene 029) ↔ the Concavity as the U.S.'s territorial "gift" to Canada (scene 030/016) — and, in benign-administrative key, Hal's "This is their gift to us" about the engineered common enemy (p. 113, scene 036).
• The black-widow webs under the outcropping (p. 108) pre-echo the spider-dread that saturates JOI's father's garage monologue (scene 049, pp. 157-169) — Latrodectus mactans, later the name of JOI's production company.

• p. 105: "The horse: the gift which was not a gift. The anonymous gift brought to the door. The sack of Troy from inside." — the Entertainment's whole delivery mechanism in Trojan figure.
• p. 107: "Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith... Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care." — the temple doctrine proper; the passage AA will paraphrase as a program.
• p. 107: "Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill... Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you." — the doctrine's cold core.
• p. 107: "You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice." — the book's most-quoted thesis line; the full exchange runs pp. 106-108.
• pp. 107-108: "Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple?" — the question E.T.A., Ennet House, and the Entertainment plot all answer differently.
• p. 108: "the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs." — addiction and romantic love condemned in one breath.
• p. 109: "doorknobs hot to touch and hell-stench inside the empty rooms" — the A.F.R. base; fanaticism's actual accommodations.