{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1552",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1552,
    "subject": "Inire and the New Deluge",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-04-20T06:00:48+00:00",
    "last": "1999-04-20T06:00:48+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0025-0105@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nicholas Gevers",
        "address": "potto at webmail.co.za"
      },
      "date": "1999-04-20T06:00:48+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Inire and the New Deluge",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Very differing reactions to my suggestion re Inire as Father In Ire. I\nthink this illustrates Wolfe's fundamental and deliberate ambiguity;\nhe's assiduous in the Urth Cycle at keeping open the possibility that\nSev's actions serve the purposes of Erebus and Abaia, that the\nRagnarok future would be the more merciful to Urth's population, at\nleast allowing time for its partial evacuation (according to Ash).\nFurther, I feel that one of Wolfe's major themes is the sheer\ninscrutability of any Divine Plan: from a human perspective, the\nultimate intentions of the Hierogrammates, let alone the Increate, are\nvast and remote, allowing for almost any local cruelty as a\nside-effect of the progress to some ultimate salvation on the cosmic\nscale. This leaves the problem of how mere mortals should confront\nthis cruelty, in the execution of which Severian is necessarily, at\nleast from the immediate Commonwealth viewpoint, a dupe. I think it's\ntoo pat to maintain that the people of Urth are just literary\nconstructs whose demise is unimportant, or krill in the path of the\ninevitable orca of Destiny (to quote mantis, perhaps inaccurately);\nsurely Wolfe wants us to appreciate the magnitude of the human tragedy\nwrought by the Deluge, as a measure of the terrible (if necessary)\ncost of Faith.\n//--------------------------------------\nNicholas Gevers\npotto at webmail.co.za"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}