{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3927",
    "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'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3927,
    "subject": "Favorite quotes",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2003-04-12T04:34:40+00:00",
    "last": "2003-04-12T04:34:40+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0304-3154@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan Rabin",
        "address": "wolfe-lists at danrabin.com"
      },
      "date": "2003-04-12T04:34:40+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Favorite quotes",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I agree with Blattid about the beach scene, especially \"The idea\nis absurd. But then, all ideas are absurd,\" and \"I drew off my boots, \nthat had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that \nI might not walk shod on holy ground\" with its echo of Exodus 3:5 \n(Moses before the Burning Bush).\n\nI am also very fond of the speech of the mate-vendor at Saltus Fair:\n\n\"Oh, it rose all right.  When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he \nwas fairly struck flat for half a day.  Then he pasted up a kind of \nhat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then \nhe thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. \nThat shows what it is to be a fool--it never came to him that the \nreason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like \nit did.  He can't see the Hand in nature.\"\n\nThis has something in common with the passage about symbols inventing \nus, with Wolfe twisting the modern scientific attitude around into a \ndefense of the religious attitude.\n\nBut I also agree with Mr. Danehy-Oakes that it's the quality of the \nconstruction more so than the striking nature of the sentences in \nisolation that characterize Wolfe's writing.\n\nI just opened _Shadow and Claw_ to find the quote above, and I \nstarted to marvel once more at how much Wolfe packs into the first \nchapter of _The Book of the New Sun_.  We learn in the first \nparagraph that the narrator, Severian, may have known his future, was \na torturer's apprentice, has experienced exile, and also a \nnear-drowning.  There follows an exciting fight involving some \naristocrats who are doing something involving a recent grave, and a \nbunch of commoners who want to stop them.  The narrator comes in on \nthe side of Vodalus, and concludes the chapter by reflecting, \"I was \nquite correct--it was, as I sensed, perfectly feasible for me to \nserve Vodalus and remain a torturer.  It was in this fashion that I \nbegan the long journey by which I have backed into the throne.\"\n\nWell, I've known people who never finish reading _New Sun_, but I \ncan't imagine anybody stopping right there, with a once-exiled \npresent ruler claiming that his acceptance that he could serve both \nthe state and its enemies made him the Autarch he is today.  Must be \nquite a story in that.\n\n(Of course, his predecessor was doing the exact same thing.  Did I \nnotice the connection before now?  No.  Did it have an effect on me \nanyhow?  Of course--things act of themselves, or not at all!)\n\n   -- Dan Rabin"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}