Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Death, Memory, Ghosts, Resurrection

Peter Westlake · 21 Apr 1999, 17:39 · from urth-v0025.mbox · original

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: Peter Westlake <peter at harlequin.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) Death, Memory, Ghosts, Resurrection
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 18:39:21 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0025-0113 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0025/0113.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 09:23 1999-04-21 -0800, you wrote:
(interesting bit snipped ;-)
...
> who remembered Typhon for his
>resurrection (well, I would say the Claw);=20

I don't think anyone did; I think Typhon's suspended animation
machinery restored him exactly as it was meant to, when Severian
and Severian were fiddling with it trying to make it feed them.

Re. the interesing bit snipped above: interesting!
Some questions about Severian as living monument:

1. Who is going to see/read his memories? Perhaps he will pass
   stories on to the survivors. But he has already passed on
   his manuscripts.

2. Can't the Hierodules and their machines remember things?

3. With all that time travel going on, why bother?

I'm much more convinced by Severian's own explanation, that
the torturers are the only people who can be relied upon to
Do What Needs To Be Done.

SBear.


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/




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