Valeria

Dave Tallman · 18 Jul 2008, 05:00 · 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: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:00:46 -0600
Subject: (urth) Valeria
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-W147ABF3D5F3B3DEF346DE4D7890 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-W147ABF3D5F3B3DEF346DE4D7890 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4880237E.1010204 at gmail.com>

b sharp wrote:
> Valeria, with her home in the tower near the Atrium of Time is a pretty mysterious 
> character. Some have guessed she is Severian's mother, daughter, sister. But why is
> she included in the select company of those who have been grafted onto Severian's 
> memory, chemically?
>   

Valeria's family was connected with Typhon: "They had waited, at first, 
to leave Urth with the autarch of their era, then had waited because 
there was nothing left for them but waiting."

Could Valeria actually be a woman from Typhon's time, posing at the last 
descendant of a family with no remaining members? "I am all the sisters 
we breed... And all the sons."

The mention of the story of the Faire Rosamund in "A Solar Labyrinth" 
connects the sundial-related Valeria to the story of a royal mistress 
who was hidden from a jealous wife in a maze. ("Here Rose the Graced, 
not Rose the Chaste, reposes...") Valeria's house is reachable only by a 
maze-like underground path. Could Valeria in fact be the original of 
Kypris, the mistress of Typhon who was scanned to become the love 
goddess of the Whorl?

Kypris and Typhon produced several frozen embryos, one of which became 
Silk. Could Catherine have been already pregnant with another of these 
embryos before she met Ouen? Then Severian is actually Valeria's child, 
and this give a reason why her memories might be found in Severian (per 
the Lamarkian inheritance theory in "House of Ancestors").

Here are the sundial mottoes Valeria quotes, with correct translations 
and location references from "The Book of Sun-dials":

ASPICE UT ASPICIAR -- "Look on me that I may be looked on."
This graceful appeal from the dial to the sun was inscribed on a device
belonging to Queen Louise de Vaudemont, the wife of Henry III of France.

LUX DEI VITAE VIAM MONSTRAT,
SED UMBRA HORAM ATQUE FIDEM DOCET --
"The light of God showeth the way of life,
But the shadow telleth both the hour and teacheth the faith."
On a fine vertical dial set up in 1891 on an old stone wall which marked
the northern boundary of the Sta. Barbara mission in California.

FELICIBUE BREVIS, MISERIS HORA LONGA --
"The hour is short to the happy, long to the wretched."
Copied in 1866 from a dial from a house at Martigny. Time's hourglass 
and wings were painted above the dial.

Martigny was once called Octodurus, and it was the site of a famous 
battle by the forces of Julius Caesar. The mottoes connect Valeria with 
royalty, emperors, shadows, and torturers. Also, Santa Barbara just 
happens to be another female martyr executed by beheading. Interesting...

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