Resurrections

Lee Berman · 30 Jul 2010, 16:32 · from 2010-July.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:32:59 -0400
Subject: (urth) Resurrections
Message-ID: <SNT123-W53BE739444324D4B5D835CFAA0 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson- I get the sense that the author is trying to convey that the various 
>"kinds of resurrection" are a mortal projection; there is only one 
>source of the gift of life and that is the grace of the Increate. Then 
>there are people who presume to decide that the Increate hasn't given 
>them enough and will try to get more some other way, rather than living 
>and sharing so that what they've been given *is* enough. This kind of 
>substituion of one's judgment for that of the Increate is the first step 
>on the dark path that eventually leads the likes of Typhon and Ceryx to 
>airs of godhood, the way Vodalus presumes to substitute himself for the 
>Autarch.

So, why doesn't Wolfe have Severian reject the Autarch's pharmicon at the
last second and have him find the true, Increate-given, path toward becoming
the New Sun and Conciliator? Are we to conclude that Urth itself has an 
allotted lifespan and it has no right to be reborn and all who assist Severian
in this task are as sorcerous and evil as Vodalus and the Old Leech and others
who seek artificially extended life?

I don't know, myself. I think there are some who take this sort of dismal view
of the whole story. Severian as witless pinball bounced between evil antagonists.

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