Wall of Nessus

Jeff Wilson · 14 Jun 2010, 09:54 · from 2010-June.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:54:03 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wall of Nessus
In-Reply-To: <00b101cb0b91$16331100$bacf4a0c@rclackey>
References: <000901cb080c$a24bd6a0$3dd14a0c@rclackey><AANLkTimNF_7phiZuvwCMYZObOBCVpmbPVbROd7kc1Hq4 at mail.gmail.com><006601cb0879$4ddd39c0$59cc4a0c@rclackey>	<AANLkTilLT4407kUNfZU4wY0V73RjJAk-UllkDYkyuiHT at mail.gmail.com>
	<00b101cb0b91$16331100$bacf4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4C15FC3B.5090300 at io.com>

On 6/14/2010 2:13 AM, Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Okay so far. The Citadel was built to defend against the people. But that
> doesn't explain the Wall. In Severian's time, most of the Commonwealth's
> population seems to live *inside* the area circumscribed by the Wall.
> Uncounted millions, anyway, so clearly the Wall was not intended to keep the
> people away from the rulers in the Citadel at the center of the circular
> walled city. It was intended to keep something *out* of the city.

I think it is mad industry to debate the single purpose of the Wall. 
Even by the standards of Urthly civilization at its height, it must have 
been a tremendous undertaking beyond even an absolute Monarch's pockets 
and would have had to serve many purposes for many interested parties to 
be accomplished (jobs, defense, prestige, oppression, religion), and 
then who knows how many successive ages found other uses for it.

Millions living inside the Wall in Sev's time doesn't mean it wasn't 
better able to keep them out in ages previous.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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