Fuligin as Black Hole...

Lee Berman · 30 Jul 2010, 16:58 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:58:19 -0400
Subject: (urth) Fuligin as Black Hole...
Message-ID: <SNT123-W1243B1B9F8A26B12167E7FCFAA0 at phx.gbl>

>John Watkins- If the coloring has some meaning beyond that particular to 
>the torturers'guild (they torture people and seem to have some connection, 
>literal or metaphoric, to Catholic priesthood, so are in black), then it 
>must be read in connection with the robes of argent, the color more white
>than white, that Severian is about to put on at the end of Citadel.  So I 
>think a connection to the old sun and/or its black hole is probably intended.

Without disagreeing I'd want to point out that fuligin is the color which is 
darker than black. If black absorbs all colors of the spectrum then a black
hole is even darker because it actively sucks all light (and everything else)
out of this universe.

Conversely, argent is described as the color more pure than white. Argent can
be used to describe a shade of white but its more basic definition relates to
silver. White reflects all colors of the spectrum but (polished) silver does so
in an even more pure way.

I don't know about now, but around the time of BotNS's creation, I think quasars
were considered to possibly be the opposite of black holes, leaking energy into
our universe. Hethor's ship is called The Quasar and was powered by (demon-haunted)
mirror sails.

So the opposite of fuligin is argent. The opposite to a black hole is a quasar.
The opposite to being a torturer is being Autarch/New Sun. Mirrors? Apparently
they can be used to find good or evil. Depends on which way you pass through
the looking-glass?

I dunno. I guess I am agreeing that in addition to religious allusion there is 
modern (at the time)physics and almost surely a conveyance of sense of personal 
redemption with regard to the opposites of fuligin and argent/mirrors that we find
in BotNS.

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