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Abaia and the undines

Son of Witz · 12 Dec 2008, 17:06 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org (Son of Witz)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:06:56 +0000
Subject: (urth) Abaia and the undines
Message-ID: <W13781042786671229101616@webmail43>


>On the first point, Severian writes this in TCotA before he experiences 
>and writes TUotNS: Then those who walk the corridors walked back to the 
>time when he was young, and my own story---as I have given it here in so 
>many pages---began. The second thing is this. He was not returned to his 
>own time but became himself a walker of the corridors. I know now the 
>identity of the man called the Head of Day, and why Hildegrin, who was 
>too near, perished when we met, and why the witches fled. I know too in 
>whose mausoleum I tarried as a child, that little building of stone with 
>its rose, its fountain, and its flying ship all graven. I have disturbed 
>my own tomb, and now I go to lie in it. 

Problems: 
---He can't yet know 
>that HD/AP is himself in his own future, as well as an aquastor who 
>presumably is immortal. Later he is stunned when he finds out. So he 
>must be another Severian---Sev 1 out of 2, or else a corpse the single 
>Severian left behind. 


The quote above, I believe, is accurate speculation by Severian. Good Intuition.  He's not "stunned" in tUotNS, he just marvels at it.  He encounters his healed face, 10 years older than when he saw Apu Punchau, and he now looks like Apu Punchau whereas he didn't see the likeness before.  He's marveling at this 'new face' not shocked to understand his identity.

There is only One Severian Consciousness.  Many bodies, but only one consciousness. Consciousness is primary in Being. There are not mulitiple Severians unless there are multiple consciousnesses.



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