Severian's family tree

Roy C. Lackey · 25 Aug 2006, 05:46 · 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: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:46:20 -0500
Subject: (urth) Severian's family tree
Message-ID: <001001c6c809$cdcf17c0$753ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

b sharp wrote:
>Thecla taking over in midsentence seems to be the majority view of those
>weighing in but it still seems wrong to me.  That breaks the established
>structure of the paragraph.  Also, why is the the word "Thecla" used?  Why
>wouldn't it be:
>
>...I played again with pebbles, I dodged the hooves....

I agree that the passage, as it appears in print, is clumsy. It bothered
Borski, as it bothered you. It bothers me. I don't know if the fault is
Wolfe's or the printer's or even that it is a mistake at all.

Nevertheless, it isn't enough to put Thecla in the Citadel as a child. In
addition to the evidence I've presented so far, there is this.

We know that Thecla was born in the House Absolute. (Vatic Fountain
prophesy) We know she was living in a wing of the House Absolute at age 13.
(Domnina episode) (Not incidentally, Thecla seemed to be living there with
her mother at that time. At least, it was her "mother's servitrix" who
answered the door for poor Domnina.)

I mentioned before that Thecla's family had a villa near Thrax. That is
where she spent at least part of her early childhood, probably up to the
time of puberty. The proof is in the very first memories inherited from her
that came to Severian after eating her flesh. From the penultimate paragraph
of chapter XI in CLAW:

"Just when I despaired--she was there, filling me as a melody fills a
cottage. I was with her, running beside the Acis when we were a child. I
knew the ancient villa moated by a dark lake, the view through the dusty
windows of the belvedere, and the secret space in the odd angle between two
rooms where we sat at noon to read by candlelight."

-Roy

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