# Atria I Have Known and Loved *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 11 Jul 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. --- ### Peter Stephenson *11 Jul 1998, 13:53* This is the quotation I was scrabbling for before. The old orchard and the herb garden beyond it had been so silent, so freighted with oblivion, that they recalled to me the Atrium of Time, and Valeria with her exquisite face warmed in furs. Claw, chapter XXIII, opening words Apart from the first reaction `Not thinking about women *again*?', this shows just the associations I was trying to suggest for the Atrium. The Atrium doesn't *travel* in time, which implies darting back and forth, materialising in 1970s Britain to defeat the Sea Devils, materialising in 19th Century Britain to defeat horrible things in the sewers, materialising in 1980s... well, you get the picture. It remains fixed in time, unmoving (remember the carved animals?), while all else travels forward. Of course, we know it has seasons, but that's just the stuff it's fixed with respect to. (It's OK, I don't understand that either.) Wolfe probably means `atrium' to have something like the classical meaning (is there a Peristylium of Time?), but the word, in modern parlance, means something like a big reception area, not unlike a Wolfean Antechamber, where you wait and wait and nothing happens. corncrake ---