The Green Man and Agia

Peter Westlake · 02 Jun 1999, 10:50 · from urth-v0027.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) The Green Man and Agia
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 1999 11:50:56 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0027-0051 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0027/0051.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 09:46 1999-06-02 +0200, you wrote:
...
>I don't want to drag this out into a pointless argument over points of view
>(viewless argument over views of points?) [I was arguing the green man,
>although he comes from the future, is a fraud when it comes to `predicting'
>people's personal histories], but... are there really genuine prophets in
>the Book?  There are people who've seen the future, and can report on their
>own experience there; there are even beings who live backward in time;
>there are people with magic mirrors who can see things which may or not be
>there.  But it doesn't seem to me there is anyone with supernatural sight.
>It would seem to violate the `no magic' rule.  I'd be fascinated to hear a
>counterexample.

Not a person, but what about the Vatic Fountain? It shows Severian all sorts
of things from his future. How does it work? Does it just show lots of thin=
gs
and let you interpret them after the fact, or can it really prophesy? Would
it work for anyone else? If not, how does it know who's looking at it? Or is
Severian projecting his own foreknowledge of the future (if any) onto it?

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