# Phaedria [Digest urth.v009.n007] *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 10 Apr 1998* > 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. --- ### John Bishop *10 Apr 1998, 08:14* In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", one of the versions of the narrator is Phaedrus. If I recall correctly, Phaedrus is a child of Apollo by a mortal woman, who begged his father to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun. He could not control the horses and eventually was thrown out over the sea, fell and drowned. "Zen" is the story of a man who dove into pre-Socratic philosophy, and went mad (the causitive implication is there in the book). He got electroshock therapy as a result of which the previous personality effectively died and a new personality (the narrator) was born. The new personality named the old one Phaedrus. It's quite likely that Wolfe read "Zen", and pretty much certain that he knows the Greek myth. Would not "Phaedria" be the feminine form? -John ---