# Hard to say goodbye (RTTW spoiler) *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 20 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. --- ### Adam Stephanides *20 Feb 2001, 09:34* > on 2/19/01 10:38 AM, James Jordan at jbjordan at gnt.net wrote: > But is Silk > the kind of man who cannot face saying farewell to people he has > unwittingly wronged? Okay, we can distinguish between Book Silk and Real > Silk, and say that Book Silk would never act this way, while Real Silk > might. But I'm not convinced this is enough. As i said in my earlier post, this is a good question, and I don't have a really good answer. One possibility that occurred to me is that Hoof and Hide are not only reminders of the worst time in Silk's life, when he was literally insane with grief; they were witnesses to Silk's delusion, as well as being subjects of it, in a sense. It wouldn't be surprising for Silk now to find their presence both painful and embarrassing (perhaps he realizes he won't be able to conceal his reaction, and wants to spare them the pain this would cause them). But, as you say, I'm not convinced this is enough. But there are other unanswered questions surrounding Silk's departure. Why does he find it necessary to leave so quickly, after all the effort made by both Horn and "Horn" to bring him? And why does he refuse to see Horn's sons, but bring along Horn's wife, even though the reason he gives applies equally to her? I can guess at plausible answers, but they'd just be guesses. It's clear that, for whatever reason, Wolfe wanted to get this episode over with as quickly as possible, even if that meant leaving Silk's and Nettle's motives unexplained (had he wanted to, he could have found some way to convey this information to the "editors," even without having Silk talk to his sons). --Adam *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ---