Babbie

John Watkins · 19 Mar 2009, 15:11 · 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: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:11:47 -0400
Subject: (urth) Babbie
In-Reply-To: <49C25A2D.1050406 at verizon.net>
References: <mailman.8702.1237472566.18432.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<49C25A2D.1050406 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0903190811m4fcf9806w2ad42d35f53acf66 at mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 10:43 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> I forget the name of the character, but I recall that the farthest-down
> "deity" is pretty clearly identified with the farthest-up.


The Most Low God does claim to be the Most High God.  But he's lying--the
text is fairly clear (given that it's Wolfe) on the point.


> His/her dealings with Abel thus parallel Abaia's undines' dealings with
> Severian. There are wars and rebellions, but they resemble Vodalus'
> rebellion against the State but which did not necessarily oppose the
> Autarch. If these creatures' offers are temptations, they are also tests.
>
> In other words, it's far more complex than simple oppositional dualism.
> Falling into error doesn't doom one's soul and make one a social outcast,
> as the Devil giggles and snorts with glee, as in the Victorian or Protestant
> German imagination. So perhaps Wolfean characters do in fact treat with the
> devil all the time, but he is surely an aspect of the divine and thus not
> really the devil. Or something like that.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:54:30 -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:
>        <93d4039f0903190654p11fd2b42ge04c4adb1ccce5ee at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:43 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net
> >wrote:
>
>
> >
>> > Thus, even the dead ends are not really "dead" just as the gods and
>> their
>> > myths are not really "false," and since the "traps and snares" I
>> referred to
>> > (Milton) are always set by the Devil, who apparently has no presence in
>> > Wolfe (or if he does he works for the Increate), they don't exist. It's
>> an
>> > interesting contrast with Protestantism---and Satan-obsessed
>> Catholicism?
>> >
>> > I think the Devil does exist in Wolfe's work.  He's portrayed pretty
>>
>>
> directly in Wizard Knight, for example, and I'm not sure we're supposed to
> think that there's anything redeemable about the Squid God and his ilk.
>
> That said, I do think that Wolfe flirts with the Origenism we see in George
> MacDonald and, to a lesser extent, C.S. Lewis.
>
>
>
>
> >
>> > ------------------------------
>>
>
>
> ---
> avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
> Virus Database (VPS): 090318-0, 03/18/2009
> Tested on: 3/19/2009 10:43:59 AM
> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090319/92dea5cc/attachment-0001.htm>

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