Like a good Neighbor

James Wynn · 21 Nov 2011, 17:08 · from 2011-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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:08:25 -0600
Subject: (urth) Like a good Neighbor
In-Reply-To: <2487114869464FA8B2F62C7BA480D270@Rover>
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> *From:* James Wynn <mailto:crushtv at gmail.com>
>>
>>     From OBW:
>>     "Once, as I lay there at the bottom of the pit,...
>>
> > Gerry wrote:
>> > > It happened *after* Horn came to himself and sat up.
>
> > Gerry, that's not what he wrote. He explicitly says, "Once, as I lay 
> there at the
> > bottom of the pit". The point in the story is undetermined but it is 
> BEFORE
> >  he sat up. It straightforwardly the opposite of your reading.
> You're forgetting the *thirst*.  It was when he came to himself and 
> sat up that he noticed he was thirsty.  When the long-nosed man sent 
> him on his astral voyage, he told Nettle he was dying of thirst.  So 
> the long-nosed man must have come after Horn came to himself and sat 
> up. He lay there both before and after sitting up that time.  What 
> else would he do to rest?  He could not climb walls or lick dew for 
> days on end.  So "once as I lay there" tells us nothing.  But the 
> thirst tells us the sequence of events.

Gerry, Gerry, Gerry... Sigh. I post the text again with the (what I 
mistakenly thought was unnecessary)  excised text. :

***************
The first paragraph relates events AFTER he encountered and discoursed 
with  Krait.

    Last night I stopped writing because I could not bring myself to
    describe the rest of that day, or the night that followed it, or the
    day that followed that, the day on which I licked dew from the sides
    of the pit, lying on my belly at first, then kneeling, then
    standing---and at last, when the Short Sun peeped over the rim and
    the dew was almost gone, wiping the stone above my head with fingers
    that I thrust into my mouth the moment they felt damp. Altogether I
    got two mouthfuls of water, at most. No more than that, certainly,
    and very likely it was less.


The next event relates to EARLIER only shortly after he had encountered 
Krait.

    Earlier I had prayed, then cursed every god in my heart when the
    rescuer they sent had proved to be Krait. On that day I did not
    pray, or curse, or any such thing.


NOW the rhythm of is telling upended. You have been tricked by Wolfe's 
subtle story-telling (you are not the first, we've all been there). The 
next event takes place even earlier.

    This is what I least wished to write about last night, but I am
    going to try to write it down this evening. *Once*, as I lay there
    at the bottom of the pit, it seemed to me that a man with a long
    nose (a tall man or an immense spider) stood over me. I did not move
    or even open my eyes, knowing that if I did he would be gone. He
    touched my forehead with something he held, and the pit vanished.
    I was standing in Nettle's kitchen. She was making soup, and I
    watched her add a whole plateful of chopped meat to her kettle and
    shake the fire. She turned and saw me, and we kissed and embraced. I
    explained to her that I was not really in her kitchen at all, that I
    lay at the bottom of a pit in a ruin of the Vanished People on an
    island far away, and that I was dying of thirst.
    "Oh," Nettle said, "I'll get you some water."
    She went to the millstream and brought back a dipper of clean, cool
    water for me; but I could not drink. "Come with me," I told her.
    "I'll show you where I am, and when you give me your water there
    I'll be able to drink it." I took her hand (yes, Nettle my darling,
    I took your hard, hardworking little hand in mine) and tried to lead
    her back to the pit in which I lay. She stared at me then as if I
    were some horror from the grave, and screamed. I can never forget
    that scream.
    And I lay in the pit, as before. The Short Sun was burning gold.


This likely places the events with the long-nosed fellow (our narrator) 
on the night before THIS happens (at the beginning of the chapter:
"Sunlight warmed me. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that it would be 
painful to look at the sun."
****************************


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