Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
rocky way over the barriers of time or watering the broad valley till it smiles anew in an Eden
bloom. -- "Editor's Table," Harpers Magazine, August 1858
Everything lies in everyone of us, but has to be brought to the surface. It grows a little in one,
more in that one's child, more in that child's child, and so on and on -- with curious breaks as of
a river which every now and then takes to an UNDERGROUND COURSE. -- George
MacDonald, The Flight of the Shadow (1891)
Among literary scholars, interest in the Bible during the first three quarters of the twentieth
century can be pictured as an UNDERGROUND STREAM that finally came to the surface
around 1960. -- Leland Ryken and Tremper Longman, eds., The Complete Literary Guide to
the Bible (1993)
Neo-Platonism may be compared to an UNDERGROUND RIVER that flows through European
history, sending up, from time to time, springs and fountains; and wherever its fertilizing stream
emerges, there imaginative thought revives, and we have a period of great art and poetry. --
Kathleen Raine, Blake and Antiquity (1979)
Cather implies a sharp contrast between the now of Marie's passions and that of Alexandra's,
whereas Alexandra keeps the "UNDERGROUND RIVER" of her inner life safely hidden below
the surface of her consciousness, so that it can continue to feed her art, Marie lets the river of
her emotions rise up to the surface, only to drain her inner wellspring. -- Demaree C. Peck, The
Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction (1996)
The great excitement of Great Expectations -- and it is still there, on the screen -- has to do with
the rediscovery that visual storytelling was not just a notional link between Charles Dickens and
movies, but an UNDERGROUND RIVER that had broken above ground. -- The Guardian,
January 23, 2007, review of the movie Great Expectations (1997)
And language bubbled out of place as a spring from UNDERGROUND STREAMS the soil
concealed. -- Meena Alexander, "Poetry, The Question of Home," internet posting, Academy of
American Poets, 2009
No matter how insistently scholars and metaphysicians wave their dowsing wands, the sources
of creative artistry remain largely undiscovered. Secret UNDERGROUND RIVERS of
imagination can bubble up at unexpected times and places. If the geology of talent were a
completely developed science, it might explain George Crumb to us. -- Donal Henahan,
"Review/Music, Helping George Crumb Celebrate His Birthday" -- New York Times, October
26, 1989
And like an UNDERGROUND RIVER, it waits for the right moment (an event or transition) to
resurface in the form of beliefs, fantasies, and actions. It is here, where it breaks the surface of
life, the intergenerational transference has to be caught unawares, challenged, acknowledged,
revised, and sent on its way. -- Vittorio Cigoli and Eugenia Scabini, Family Identity, Ties,
Symbols, and Transitions (2006)
Was this -- like the emergence of some UNDERGROUND RIVER -- the musical reincarnation
of impulses subconsciously remembered from generations earlier and producible only when the
carrier of this memory had developed his instrumental technique sufficiently to cope with it? --
"The New Grove Dictionary of American Music," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1987
[Quentin's relived present] moves along in the shadow, like an UNDERGROUND RIVER, and
reappears only when it itself is past. -- Jean-Paul Sartre, "On The Sound and the Fury, Time in
the Work of Faulkner," Literary and Philosophical Essays, 1955
Nathan Adler uses the term "antinomian" to designate opposition to customary moral obligations.
The Underground Stream, New Lifestyles and the Antinomian Personality (1972) is an effort to
explain culture of LSD.
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