from Robert Pogue Harrison's new "The Names of the Dead"-- his 1992 "Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation" one of my favorites: "One's initial impression of the memorial wall from a distance is that of its dramatic horizontal extension, yet as one descends along the pathway toward the highest part of the wall the anxiety of the vertical gradually wins out over that of the horizontal stretch to infinity. Joyce's image of the snow, by contrast, works the other way around. The verticality of the snow's descent gives way, by the end of the last paragraph of The Dead, to a more sublime impression of its vast horizontal extension over all of Ireland. Yet the effect in both cases is similar. The tense relationship between extension and descension gives both symbols their sublime epic reach....The epic's vocation, as well as its burden, is to contain such excess in its narrative, ideological drive toward synthesis. We have seen, if only briefly and in passing, what moral strains and pressures this put on Virgil as well as Dante when it came to representing or accounting for the fates of history's plethora of victims. In the case of the memorial wall, the excess of names is uncontainable, not because the wall cannot accommodate them--it does--but because in its mute memory of the Vietnam War, it proclaims, or seems to, that each one of its inscriptions is one too many. The excess lies in the moral doubt raised in and by each and every name. The wall, in its conception and its material presence, is pervaded with the pathos of an early, sacrificial death reminiscent of Virgil's infernal scene of "high-hearted heroes stripped of life, and boys / and unwed girls, and young men set upon / the pyre of death before their fathers' eyes." Yet Rome--that "eternal idea in the mind of God" which would honor or redeem these deaths--is missing."