# Silk Hoseary *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 11 Feb 2001* > 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. --- ### Nigel Price *11 Feb 2001, 23:14* Recently, Dennis/Endy wrote... >> I see Silk and Hy after the end of Exile >> as the relationship of Hosea and >> Gomer of the Old Testament Bible. >> Hosea constantly had to go to the >> marketplace and drag Gomer back >> home to keep her from sleeping with >> other men. I agree with you, Dennis, about the echo of Hosea in Silk's situation. I mentioned this to Nick Gevers a year or so back as a response to his interpretation of Silk's failure to leave the Whorl as an indication of moral failure. Did I mention this in private correspondence, Nick, or on the Whorl list? I can't remember. Anyway, Nick had compared Silk's failure to see Blue with Moses' failure to reach the promised land, and I had suggested that, in contrast, Silk's refusal to abandon the beautiful but unworthy Hyacinth evoked for me strong echoes of Hosea's love for his faithless wife Gomer, which is interpreted in scripture as an allegory of God's love for his unfaithful people Israel. I still see Silk's love for Hyacinth as in some way echoing Christ's love for the world ("...while we were yet sinners..."), rather than a sign of his failure to overcome earthly temptation. *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ---