Shadow, Chapter X

Allan Anderson · 13 Nov 2008, 19:40 · from 2008-November.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: rubel at goosemoon.org (Allan Anderson)
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:40:53 -0800
Subject: (urth) Shadow, Chapter X
In-Reply-To: <002c01c945be$cb1f51e0$37cf4a0c@rclackey>
References: <606884.13175.qm at web59609.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
	<002c01c945be$cb1f51e0$37cf4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <491C82C5.4010906 at goosemoon.org>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Matt Teel wrote:
>
>   
>>> I've checked the archives, but don't see that this has been discussed:
>>>       
> what do you all make of the enigmatic reference at the beginning of Shadow
> Chapter X (The Last Year), where Severian and Roche are leaving the House
> Azure and the white-haired man pulls out something that Severian assumes at
> first to be an icon, but then discovers is a vial shaped like a phallus?
>
> Possible foreshadowing of his becoming Autarch? I don't know. Even if it is
> foreshadowing, it should make sense within the scene itself, but I can't
> quite figure it out.
>
> Anyone want to guess?<<
> ______________________________
>   

Now, I need to read this bit again to be sure, but didn't Severian react 
with disgust? I remember thinking that Sev's impression was that the 
white-haired fellow was a dirty old man, possibly that he was hitting on 
Sev obliquely. I took it as Severian's shock in going from an aesthetic 
life to a sexual one. "Where I used to see icons, now I see dingdongs! I 
am both aroused and disturbed."

I expect that everything's correct concerning what you folks have said 
about the plot behind the scenes. But it's also fun (and I think useful) 
when we can go back to the original impression and feeling we took away 
from a first reading.

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