{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1610", "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": 1610, "subject": "scrap", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "1999-05-01T14:57:49+00:00", "last": "1999-05-01T14:57:49+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "oreb", "address": "oreb at apexmail.com" }, "date": "1999-05-01T14:57:49+00:00", "subject": "(urth) scrap", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "\n\n\n\n\n\n~~~\n\nLM: The Book of the New Sun, maybe especially The Citadel of the Autarch,\ndeals with the nature of death and the afterlife, the role of human beings\nin the scope of the cosmos, all sorts of grand issues. Are the basic\ninsights Severian eventually achieves essentially those you personally\nshare?\n\nGW: They're very close indeed, which is why the Citadel is my favorite of\nthe four books. I tried to prepare the reader for some of these insights by\nearlier placing Severian within that immense backdrop of war. Severian is a\nsoldier; and like any soldier in any war, he sees parts of the battlefield\nhe's involved in as vitally important, essential, whereas he's really just a\nvery small part of a very large picture. Having established Severian's\nrelationship to the larger picture, in the latter part of the book I wanted\nto say, \"Look, this is just a small, backwater planet - one of many\nplanets - and this isn't a particularly interesting or pivotal period in its\nhistory. The solar system to which this planet belongs is part of a galaxy\nsimilar to quite a number of other spiral galaxies. And all this exists in\na universe that is just one in a series of recurring universes. What any\nindividual human being sees, no matter how broad the vista, is just a tiny\ncorner of what is happening in creation.\"\n\nThere's a scene in C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce that made a lasting impression\non me. The book is about a one-day bus excursion for people who are in Hell\nwho want to visit Heaven to see what's there. Toward the end, everyone is\nsaying, \"Wow, everything here is so beautiful, look at these gorgeous trees\nand waterfalls and animals! But where is the infernal city that we just\nleft?\" At this point the angel who's leading them around says, \"It's right\nthere in that crack between those two rocks - *that's* the city you've come\nout of.\" At the end of The Citadel, I wanted my readers to experience a\nsimilar shock of recognition at their own insignificance.\n\nLW: The outlook expressed at the conclusion seems fundamentally religious in\norientation.\n\nGW: I don't scoff at religion the way many people do when they look at\nanything that has to do with speculations about things we can't touch. I'm\na practicing Catholic, although I don't think that designation would give\npeople much of an idea about what my beliefs are. People tend to have a\nvery limited, sterotyped view of what it means to be a Catholic, images\ntaken from movies or anti-Catholic pamphlets, but there's much more to it\nthan that. I know perfectly well, for example, that priests can't walk on\nwater, that they are merely human beings who are trying, often\nunsuccessfully, to live out a very difficult ideal. But I certainly don't\ndismiss religious or other forms of mystical speculation out of hand. I\nread it and try to make my own judgements about it. And in The Book of the\nNew Sun, I tried to work out some of the implications of my own beliefs.\n\nexcerpt from an interview of Gene Wolfe by Larry McCafferty in \"Across the\nWounded Galaxies\", (c) 1990 by the Board of Trustees of the University of\nIllinois. University of Illinois Press.\n\n~~~\n\n" } ] } ] }