Eyes of Thecla

Rex Racer · 06 May 2006, 02:32 · from 2006-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rex.racerx at gmail.com (Rex Racer)
Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 22:32:45 -0400
Subject: (urth) Eyes of Thecla
In-Reply-To: <BAY107-F21ADD37783F97177D8FDD3D8AA0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-F10A56E7338CA69666119D8D7B50 at phx.gbl>
	<BAY107-F21ADD37783F97177D8FDD3D8AA0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <d046a0310605051932h3d6c241bj301f77051032548e at mail.gmail.com>

Actually, forebearance with an e is an acceptable variant of forbearance, so
it is not even a typo or editorial error. I actually would use it a lot in a
former life writing letters that required such serious precise verbiage

Just as "grey" seems darker to me than "gray," forebearance just seems more
"serious"

On 5/5/06, mournings glory <mourningsglory at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >From: "b sharp" <bsharporflat at hotmail.com>
>
> >In Solar Labyrinth(and perhaps briefly in the Archives) Robert Borsky
> makes
> >an elaborate argument that Appian is Thecla's father.  Most of the
> evidence
> >he uses stems from clues that Appian was involved in her upbringing.
> There
> >seems very little to suggest he has a genetic connection to her.
>
> I came across what is either an interesting clue in this regard, a typo,
> or
> sloppy copy-editing, depending on your druthers.
>
> In Chapter VI of _Shadow_ Severian is reading a note from Master Gurloes:
>
> "'By the will of a court we have in our keeping the exulted person of the
> Chatelaine Thecla; and by its further will we would furnish to the
> Chatelaine Thecla in her confinement such comforts as lie not beyond
> reason
> and prudence. That she may while away the moments until her time with us
> is
> come - or rather, as she has instructed me to say, until the heart of the
> Autarch, whose forebearance knows not walls nor seas, is softened toward
> her, as she prays she asks that you, consonant with your office, provide
> her
> with certain books...'"
>
> Now what is the oddest word in all of the above paragraph? It's
> "forebearance" with an -e, which relates to *ancestral* forebearers, not
> to
> "the action or habit of forbearing." In the other four books of the Urth
> cycle, Wolfe also always uses the e- version of 'forebears' to mean
> ancestors and the non-e version 'forbear' to mean, "to bear with, have
> patience with, put up with, tolerate."
>
> So is this indeed a secret clue as to Thecla's paternity? Or simply a
> typo/copyediting mistake? (Speaking of which, has the Garsec/Garvaon
> mistake
> been corrected in the trade paperback edition of _Wizard Knight_? Sad to
> say, but the very nice SFBC edition of _Book of the Short Sun_, despite
> being printed on much higher quality paper, perpetuates all the typos of
> the
> original edition, which is surely the most error-ridden of any Wolfe book,
> primary or secondary.)
>
> Also, if not a typo, however would such wordplay survive translation into
> another language?
>
> Me sSe eg
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060505/0148b39d/attachment.htm

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net