Severian's family tree

Roy C. Lackey · 24 Aug 2006, 05:23 · 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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:23:31 -0500
Subject: (urth) Severian's family tree
Message-ID: <000e01c6c73d$7309ea80$a23ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

Don Doggett wrote:
>Even if b sharp is correct in his interpretation, Ymar is a more likely
candidate for the shared memory  than Thecla, as his childhood is
definitively established in the citadel.<<

Severian doesn't have Ymar's memories. The only more-or-less intact memories
he acquired came from the directly-ingested flesh (plus analeptic) of Thecla
and Appian. The chain of autarchic memories inherited from Appian grows
weaker and weaker the further removed the memory of a particular autarch is
from the present.

Severian, interrupting his narrative to directly address the reader at the
time he was writing, wrote:

"Ymar is dead, and such memories of his as lived for a time in the blood of
his successors are long faded.
    "So mine in time shall fade too." (SHADOW, chapter XVII)

That's why he "spent weary days in reading the histories of my
predecessors". (ibid., previous page) That's where he got the anecdote about
Ymar and the dog. Such accounts were stark and very unsatisfying to him.

-Roy

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