PF as YA

Jerry Friedman · 16 Apr 2009, 20:15 · from 2009-April.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: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:15:54 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) PF as YA
In-Reply-To: <37bfbeb60904161040v5db718e8j1755eee5167937df at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <23742.61143.qm at web50710.mail.re2.yahoo.com>

--- On Thu, 4/16/09, Jonathan Goodwin <joncgoodwin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think by the time that he's writing his narrative, in
> America, as a
> traditionalist priest, he is meant to be a wholly
> sympathetic
> character by Wolfe. I do not find him so, for any number of
> reasons,
> but my feeling is that Wolfe does intend him to be.
...

Mostly I find him sympathetic.  However, I didn't like his
sophistry about why it didn't matter that he planned to break
his vow of chastity, or the fact that he broke his vow of
obedience and planned to break his vow of poverty without a
word to us on the subject.  I'd have liked him better if
he'd said, "I know I took these vows, but I'm going to break
them because my wife and our unborn, long-dead child are the
most important things to me."

It also seemed that he wasn't serious about the religion he
was professing.  When he discusses moral problems such as
whether it's okay to knock down obstreperous teenage boys
("the fighting priest who can talk to the young"?) or
teach children to violently resist molestation, I don't
remember him ever mentioning the Church's view.  He
certainly believes in God, but I remember no sign that
he believes in the divinity of Jesus or the holiness of
any saint.  I don't find this sort of thing sympathetic in
a clergyman, but I don't know what Wolfe intends.

Do we ever find out why he chose the priesthood when he
returned to the 21st Century?  Or whether, when he chose it,
he was already thinking that he'd leave for the 17th if
Communism fell in Cuba?

Jerry Friedman

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