Succession Memories

David Stockhoff · 03 Aug 2010, 11:53 · from 2010-August.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:53:08 -0400
Subject: (urth) Succession Memories
In-Reply-To: <4C5783A6.90800 at io.com>
References: <101623.22538.qm at web84106.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<80a2bbca1fd590cb06a6e67da1dd9121.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>	<4C5769FE.1010100 at verizon.net>
	<4C5783A6.90800 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4C580324.3040306 at verizon.net>

That works. Even if it was not a routine practice, some autarchs may 
have done that for various reasons.

Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 8/2/2010 7:59 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>> That's a damn good question. You could pass on the codes without the
>> alzabo, but then what happens to your memories?
>
> Another possibility is that the Autarchs add memories of freshly dead 
> Commonwealthers of some merit or useful perspective. As memories fade 
> with succession, they may feel the need to add another of the now 
> inaccessible kind, explaining the multiple children and farmwives.
>
> This also explains why Severian is the final Autarch in another way: 
> his eidetic memory revives the fading imprints so that he has 
> sufficient awareness of them that all of them serve him in a 
> significant way at the trial, while someone attempting to add all the 
> memories directly to himself would be driven mad or incapacitated by 
> the myriad, vivid memory-sets all second hand fresh.
>

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