{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1757",
    "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": 1757,
    "subject": "Amended Seasons",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-08-20T03:27:05+00:00",
    "last": "1999-08-20T03:27:05+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0069@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Roy C. Lackey",
        "address": "rclackey at stic.net"
      },
      "date": "1999-08-20T03:27:05+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Amended Seasons",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "mantis,\n\nLooking at the exact way it is expressed in the appendix to CLAW, \"The\n*month* is the (then) lunar one of 28 days...\", it would seem that the\nparenthetical \"then\" is intended by Wolfe to indicate that, for whatever\nreason, Lune in Severian's time *does* have a more precise 28 day cycle than\nin ours.\n\nThough I have made a valid argument from the text that the Feast of Holy\nKatharine takes place in spring, I can make another, also from the text,\nthat seems to place it squarely in winter. Besides the snow that fell on the\nnight of the trip to the House Azure, other weather-related comments made\nduring the trip seem to imply that the season is far deeper into winter than\njust a late-winter snowfall. Also, after that trip, on the second page of\nthe next chapter, titled \"The Last Year\", Sev says: \"All that winter while\nsnow whitened the Old Yard, I came up from the oubliette as if from sleep,\nand started to see the tracks my feet left behind me and my shadow on the\nsnow. Thecla was sad that winter...\". Next paragraph: \"Spring came, and with\nit the purple-striped and white-dotted lilies of the necropolis.\" Now, these\ncomments seem to place the Feast in the dead of winter, not even \"in the\nfading of winter\". This seems to contradict my idea that the Feast actually\ntakes place in late spring, yet what I posted earlier in defense of my idea\nis also true. Wolfe expends the better part of a page on Ultan talking about\nhis guilds' spring ceremonies and mentions all the trees giving shade along\nIubar street in Nessus.\n\nSo, in the same year, the year Drotte and Roche were elevated, after the\nFeast of Holy Katharine, Ultan tells Sev that the curators' feast day is in\nearly spring and has already passed. Then, Sev goes back to the torturers'\ntower, meets Thecla, begins his daily sessions with her, it is hard winter,\ntime passes, and *then* spring comes.\n\nFurther, the following year, the year of Sev's elevation, on the eleventh\nday after Thecla's death, when Sev is being escorted to see Palaemon, he\npasses an open door to the outside and sees the sunlight and \"breathed that\nwet wind that tells in winter that spring is almost come.\" To complicate\nmatters, on the very next page (page 105), while talking to Palaemon, Sev\nnotes: \"The first brass-backed fly of the new summer buzzed against the\nport.\" Huh? There's a late-winter wind coming in the door and a new-summer\nfly at the window? Yet trees and flowers are in bloom outside the Citadel\nwhen Sev leaves for exile.\n\nIt's tempting to just dismiss these and the other Gurloes two-day-week\nanomaly I mentioned before as Wolfe just screwing up, but I don't think so.\nThe contradictory elements of each instance come too close together to be\nmistakes. I think Wolfe is saying something about the nature of the Citadel.\nPerhaps the fact that it contains the elusive Atrium of Time, its connection\nto the House Absolute via the space/time warping library and probably the\nsubterranean tunnels, as well as the implied fact that Holy Katharine has\nbeen making her annual appearances, seemingly unchanged, for centuries, all\nserve to establish that the Citadel, though coeval with the Urth around it,\nis not entirely congruent with it.\n\nRoy"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}