miles, jonas, and that sailor guy, and sea/interplanetary vessels

Lee Berman · 10 Feb 2011, 13:01 · from 2011-February.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:01:02 -0500
Subject: (urth) miles, jonas, and that sailor guy,
	and sea/interplanetary vessels
Message-ID: <SNT123-W59EC783C8707067ECEA980CFEC0 at phx.gbl>

>David Duffy- > So you think Gene Wolfe might be a devil??

>Jeff Wilson- "You ever read Meister Eckhardt? . . . Eckhardt saw hell, too. You know
>what he said? He said the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of
>you that won't let go of your life. Your memories, your attachments.
>They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're
>freeing your soul. . . . So the way he see's it, if you're frightened of
>dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away.
>But if you've made your *peace*, then the devils are really angels,
>freeing you from the earth."

That is funny. Because David Duffy's question made me think of nothing else more
than Wolfe's Peace. Jeff's quote seems quite germaine to that novel also.

Anyway, I think Gene Wolfe might consider himself a form of devil. In part because he
addresses many of his personal demons through his work. And in part because he recognizes
that an author is a demiurge. A false god who appears to create everything in the universe
of his stories but is, in fact, working entirely with substance from the true Creator and God.

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