Time Structures on Urth

Jeff Wilson · 11 Aug 2010, 17:03 · 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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:03:32 -0500
Subject: (urth) Time Structures on Urth
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W452FF867818776C2814B07CF960 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W452FF867818776C2814B07CF960 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4C62D7E4.2050200 at io.com>

On 8/11/2010 7:27 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
> So I assume that the top of Valeria's tower, like the top of Last House,
> exists in Severian's future which is why he cannot find either. Valeria is said
> to be old fashioned and antiquely dressed. She lives in the lower levels of her
> tower. I deduce that her tower (and perhaps other towers around the Atrium of Time)
> is a time structure with lower levels in the past. From Severian's perspective,
> the Last House does not have any lower levels.

Technically, that is inductive rather than deductive reasoning. 
Deductive reasoning would require at least part of thee tower to be 
visible midway between the past and the future, if that were the case.

>> From the comparison of these two structures I think we can find others which share
> the features of a labyrinthine entrance path to a vertical structure which transports
> people to a different time. I think the clearest example is the Jungle Hut. I think
> Robert, Marie and Isangoma are meant to be shown as on Earth and not Urth. Since
> Severian and Agia have to ascend to get there I think it shows that Earth, in some way,
> is the future of Urth.

The jungle hut can't work the same way as the Last House, because the 
Last House's upper floors look out onto the future many chiliads later 
than the era the "ground floor" opens onto. Robert is seen looking down 
from the hut at the ground and clearly sees Severian and Agia 
approaching in real time, and freaks out. The airplane in the sky is 
anachronistic, but still fits in with the jungle hut as a whole since 
Marie mentions the landing strip is three days away by overland travel. 
There might be time travel involved on the part of the Botanic Gardens 
over all, but I see no evidence the hut itself is special.

> I started a thread a while back called "Wolfe as Heretic". In one interview he observes that,
> with the episode in the Temple, Jesus knew what it was to be a torturer. I think we can all
> recognize that Jesus was more spiritually advanced than Severian. Is it heresy to suggest
> that the Christ-figure in the universe which is above Yesod would be more spiritually advanced
> than Jesus? 		 	   		

Probably, but that's necesary. It may be that the there are many 
appearances of Christ there, for instance, like the Bradbury story "The 
Man" where the astronauts show up the week after His appearance on an 
alien planet. For that matter, there may have been a Jesus on Urth, but 
the human race someehow rejected His or even his message while keeping 
the trappings. This lets Robert and Marie be in Urth's past, along with 
the Sand Garden where the sojurn in the desert happened differently or 
not at all.

-- 
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