Dionysus

James Wynn · 02 Dec 2010, 20:38 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:38:18 -0600
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
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> Gerry Quinn-
> As for the rest, though, I'm not terribly convinced.  If the 
> Neighbours can resurrect bodies, why not just fix Horn? 

Perhaps it is because I'm old-fashioned that I don't have a problem 
imagining the soul in the body as a person inside a suit. In fact, Wolfe 
almost never presents the soul in purely classical terms. He always 
presents it as a "wave" of memories and identity--EXCEPT for Mani in the 
Wizard Knight, and...significantly...in the Book of the Short Sun. The 
Neighbors could not just heal Horn because the spirit had left. The 
Rajan has an extensive discussion about the distinctness of the human 
spirit and the body's life, and I think it speaks directly to your question:

---------------------------------
RTTW (HB) pg 66
"Let me illustrate my point. A man has a house where he lives for some 
years with his wife. They are very happy, this man and his wife. They 
love each other, and whatever else may go amiss, they have each other. 
Then the man's wife dies, and he leaves the house in which he has had so 
much happiness. It has become abhorrent to him. Unless the Outsider, the 
God of gods, restores her to life, he has no wish to see that house ever 
again. Am I making myself clear?[snip] I am speaking of the spirit 
departing the body at death. The body is the house I mentioned, and life 
was the wife who made it a place of warmth and comfort.[snip] Perhaps 
her husband goes to the gods[snip] perhaps only into darkness. For the 
moment it doesn't matter. My point is that he leaves the home she made 
for him, never to return.[snip]
"Zwaar, who had been silent until then, said, "When the spirit goes a 
man dies, I think."
I shook my head. "He dies because you shot him through the heart. Or 
because he suffered some disease or was kicked by a horse [snip] But you 
bring up an important point--that the spirit is not life, nor is the 
life spirit. And another, that the two are one. A husband is not the 
wife, no more than a wife is her husband; but the two in combination are 
one. What I was going to say was that though the man in my little story 
left his house once and for all when his wife died, he had left it many 
times previously. He had gone out to weed their garden, perhaps, or gone 
to the market to buy shoes. In these cases he left it to return."

------------------------------

Also there is in this discussion, a more direct allusion to the fact 
that Silk killed himself in grief over the death of Hyacinth:

"If you mean you wish to die when I do, Oreb, I sincerly hope you don't. 
[snip] ...under the Long Sun their rulers went so far as to have their 
favorite wives burned alive on their funeral pyres. When I die, I 
sincerely hope no friend or relative of mine will succumb to any such 
cruel foolishness."

u+16b9

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