bsharp's Inire theory

b sharp · 10 Jul 2008, 12:04 · from 2008-July.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: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:04:12 -0400
Subject: (urth) bsharp's Inire theory
Message-ID: <BAY103-W5141699C29D49BA51E73ECD7910 at phx.gbl>

Roy C. Lackey quotes:
>"'... the Cumaean, she was a Hierodule, like you. Father Inire told me.' 
>Famulimus and Barbatus nodded."

Roy wonders why they don't tell Severian more details. I would say that,
as demonstrated with Baldanders, they are prone to divulge a bare 
minimum of information. Only what is needed. Perhaps the nod is only
to acknowledege "yes, that's what Father Inire told you".

Either way I don't see how this addresses my observation that Famulimus
 and Barbatus unveiled are super-humanly beautiful while The Cumaean
unveiled is a weird snake-being and I see no evidence that Father Inire is 
beautiful under his cowl.

But I'm glad Roy brought the quote to attention.  I hadn't noticed the
word "was" before. Why the past tense? Was she formerly a hierodule
but became something else? Or is that just an imprecise way for Severian
to say he hadn't seen her for a while?

Where do The Cumaean and more importantly Father Inire go during the
events of UotNS?  Has Wolfe casually dismissed them as too unimportant
to explain?  Severian figures Father Inire won't long survive the old sun's
passing, but why?  He lasted 1000 years (most of which Severian remembers)
why couldn't he hold out for another 60 years?

My own answer is literary/religious. I think those two plus Abaia and Erebus etc.
go to the same place Zeus and Hera etc. go after the time of Jesus. But if anyone
has other ideas about them, I am interested.

-bsharp
_________________________________________________________________
The i?m Talkaton. Can 30-days of conversation change the world?
http://www.imtalkathon.com/?source=EML_WLH_Talkathon_ChangeWorld

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