Appian's Proxy?

b sharp · 21 Aug 2006, 03:27 · from 2006-August.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: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2006 23:27:20 -0400
Subject: (urth) Appian's Proxy?
Message-ID: <BAY103-F47199CE14F84618D4BFF6D7410 at phx.gbl>

Regarding Appian, Rex asks:

>who is it that rules in his absence? And do we have any sense how long the 
>former honey->steward is absent from Urth? Or at what stage in his own 
>reign he leaves? Severian waits a decade >before he journeys out and does 
>not return for forty years. But surely his predecessor is not gone >for a 
>similar amount of time.

I don't think Wolfe intends to be clear on these issues.  To even try to 
answer them I am drawn to the scene where Severian meets Appian in the House 
Absolute.  Severian wants to go to "the garden". Appian misunderstands and 
says, "I will show you the way to the Garden, though I am by no means sure 
you will be permitted to enter". Appian pulls out his mirror book, shows 
Tzadkiel to Severian and says, "Go if you dare".

The Garden..hm..more Genesis allusions?  Anyway I always took this to mean 
that Appian used that book to travel to Yesod and take his test.  No need 
for a proxy ruler. He could have been there and back in hours (returned in 
altered form, unfortunately).  Anyway, in Urth, Tzadkiel makes it clear 
Appian's test was a boondoggle intended only to help Severian, through 
acquired memory, later. (though I don't see how it did help Severian).  So I 
think there was no need for 10 years of preparation or a long voyage through 
space for Appian's trip.  If someone has to lose his manhood, best it be 
done quickly as possible, yes?

-bsharp

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