Babbie

Craig Brewer · 19 Mar 2009, 05:02 · from 2009-March.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: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:02:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Babbie
References: <mailman.7621.1237406917.18432.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<49C173FE.3090304 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <176065.18290.qm at web37605.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

David, that's a really interesting reading. I tend to think that Wolfe is more ambiguous. It's not all good, and, in fact, the way I see it, most of his stories are about the never-ending problems of figuring out the dead ends from the good made up stuff. Otherwise, why wouldn't Severian be fine believing in the Claw? Or why would Silk have to have the Outsider help him see through Pas? Or why would Able have to be forced to look up to Michael instead of down to Disiri, etc.?

I think you're right that, in the end, all the "false gods" seem to be able to be integrated, but it takes his heroes a lot of time figuring out how to do it properly without following divergent paths.

----- Original Message ----
From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 5:21:50 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Babbie

Yes, much better put. In reaching toward the divine, humans make stuff up. Some of it is true, some of it is less true.

But Wolfe doesn't seem to see any of the stuff we make up as dead ends, false gods, idols, or traps and snares. Rather, it's all good, especially if the Divine isn't offended but reaches out in turn to make the false true. And that fits his oeuvre, which is consistent in this regard, from Soldier of Sidon to Free Live Free and the Eyeflash Miracles to The Wizard Knight.

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:49:56 -0400
From: John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Babbie
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID:
    <93d4039f0903181249q69e11126h40d88e9667efde34 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Yes and no...I think Wolfe is interested in the question of how the human
mind approaches the divine and in the way that the Divine approaches the
human mind.

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090317-0, 03/17/2009
Tested on: 3/18/2009 6:21:54 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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