The Cistern under the bell keep

David Stockhoff · 12 Nov 2010, 13:18 · from 2010-November.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: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:18:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Cistern under the bell keep
In-Reply-To: <4CDCF16D.1050309 at io.com>
References: <2DD5B291-8BBB-4C81-8E4E-F440585DE7D9 at butcherbaker.org>
	<4CDCF16D.1050309 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4CDD3EB4.3000109 at verizon.net>

And the flushing of the vinculum foreshadows the flooding of Urth.

On 11/12/2010 2:49 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 11/10/2010 4:19 PM, Son of Witz wrote:
>> Severian mentions the cistern under the Bell Keep at least 8 times in 
>> his five volumes.
>> Does anyone find a particular significance to it? I haven't.  He 
>> seems to use it for comparison only, but it keeps coming up 
>> throughout the books.
>
> Well it provides foreshadowing of the flushing of the vinculum. It 
> also gives a plausible reason for a lifelong dweller in urban medieval 
> squalor to be familiar with the appearance and other properties of a 
> large volume of clear, fresh water, the better to analogize and 
> metaphorize for the first world reader.
>

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