{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1982",
    "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": 1982,
    "subject": "Sev's Memory: More Mark Twain in BNS?",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-11-24T13:37:23+00:00",
    "last": "1999-11-24T13:37:23+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0533@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Mitchell A. Bailey",
        "address": "mab at lindau.net"
      },
      "date": "1999-11-24T13:37:23+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Sev's Memory: More Mark Twain in BNS?",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, forget Borges, forget Proust - it would appear Mr. Wolfe's mentor\nis the late Samuel Clemens!<g> Now that we've spotted a possible source\nfor the \"eclipse trick\" in UNS, and the first-person narrative style\n(lifted from _Huckleberry Finn_<g>) we can go back to _Life on the\nMississippi_ and extracted excerpts of description of a person the young\n\"cub\" pilot Sam Clemens allegedly encountered during his early career:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "[I served] for a while under a pilot whose feats\nof memory were a constant marvel to me.  However, his memory was born\nin him ...\nHe could NOT forget any thing.  ...\nThe most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head,\nafter they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events. ...\nSuch a memory as that is a great misfortune.  To it, all occurrences\nare of the same size.  Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting\ncircumstance from an uninteresting one.  As a talker, he is bound\nto clog his narrative with tiresome details ....  Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject.\nHe picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way,\nand so is led aside.  Mr. Brown would start out with the honest\nintention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.\n...his memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance;\ndrift into a history of his owner; of his owner's family, ...\nand at the end of three or four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go ...\nmuttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before ...\nAnd the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,\nafter all this waiting and hungering."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Sound familiar? Compare that to Sev's complaint that the \"eidolons\" of\nhis memory were so real and absorbing they sometimes prevented him from\nacting when he needed to. I think he complained somewhat along the lines\nof \"all occurances are the same size\", too."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}