# essay *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 23 Aug 1997* > 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. --- ### Jason Voegele *23 Aug 1997, 12:37* Hi alga. I'd like a copy of the essay if you wouldn't mind :) Thanks, Jason Voegele voegele.6 at osu.edu http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~voegele 666 Everwood Ave. Columbus, OH 43214 -----Original Message----- From: Alice Turner [SMTP:al at ny.playboy.com] Sent: Friday, August 22, 1997 1:05 PM To: urth at lists.best.com Subject: (urth) More on Nadan [Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works] Ratty, I found that essay. It's not exactly short-winded, but I'll try to sum up. She thinks that the Christian symbols in the story--bleeding, bread, Easter eggs, the eagle [she explains this later], candles, a tomb, a cross w "dead leader"--"serve less as indicators of holy presence than as emphatic signs of emptiness and loss of meaning." Feels that "Can America be revitalized" hangs as a question overall. Thinks the moldy loaf is the antithesis of the communion bread. Makes quite a (long) point on how Nadan misperceives everything, his mood swings. Makes the same point someone here did--what deformity could Ardis possibly have conceled from him? Feels that the footsteps outside the door at the end which jar "the building like and earthquake" may refer to Matthew's account of an earthquake when the stone is rolled away from JC's tomb [boy, I take it back about -you- going too far!!] thinks the picnic (fraught with Christian symbolism) takes place on Good Friday. As mantis indicated, one useful thing about this essay (which is mostly full of academic bs in my opinion) is that she read both Visit to a Small Planet and Mary Rose (neither of which I'm familiar with) and shows that the described scenes in the firt are "either complete fabrication of have been fundamentally changed." Reminds us that Faust is next. She closes with a curveball about the seveth night being that which is to come: Easter. Does she think Ardis will be resurrected? Yikes. Anyway, despite my negative feelings about this essay, I will xerox and send it to anyone who emails me his address: al at ny.playboy.com It's also about The Detective of Dreams. -alga- ---