# Suicide & Hyacinth *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 Jul 2002* > 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 Ingram *13 Jul 2002, 00:57* It has been written: >> What people are persistently failing to acknowledge, though Wolfe >> flags it >> again and again, is that Hyacinth was a bad woman, and disastrous for >> Silk. Hyacinth *was* what most would call a bad woman, but I think the picture presented of her in the Long Sun series is distorted: we have only Horn and Nettle's rendition of her character. Though they may strive for impartiality, they are also admittedly jealous of her hold on Silk's attention. Horn dislikes the way Hyacinth can be cruel to Nettle, and Nettle must mislike Hyacinth's interaction with Horn. What this amounts to, in my view, is only that we have to 'read in' to the narrative what Silk sees in Hyacinth. He sees the best in people--although recent discussion of how he focuses on the flaws in others rather than his own makes me rethink this claim, there seem to be plenty of instances where Silk bemoans his own limitations and strives for humility. He is also clearly prideful, but in my view balances the two effectively. And his distress seems based on the gap between what people could be and what they allow themselves to become--yet the narrative presents readers with the worst of Hyacinth. I don't suppose Wolfe had a gnostic take on their relationship, but Simon magus and Helen do come to mind. There may have been a destructive element in their relationship, but "where danger threatens, there the saving power grows" (Holderlin) or some such. btw, have I become the tomato that ate Kansas? Sepia ---