Pike's ghost

Gerry Quinn · 01 Dec 2011, 02:14 · 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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 02:14:16 -0000
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W44B3757D0B220D442488D2CFB10 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W44B3757D0B220D442488D2CFB10 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <580ACE9A656248A8A435D5DA5182DA42@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> Yes. If we read carefully, the text more precisely supports larry:  that Severian 
> has the memories of all the old autarchs evidenced by his knowledge of ancient 
> autarch words.  That Severian finds nothing familiar in the suites set aide for 

> the autarchs suggests that no previous autarch ever used the suite. 
> 
> Thus, larry's conclusion that the contents of the suite, including the mandragora,
> may date back to Typhon's era, is supported. You could argue that Severian just 
> happens to remember the words for the suite but just happens to forget the contents. 
> But the only purpose of such a toothless assertion would be a desperate attempt to
> win a losing battle.
Severian: ?What a delight it was to discover the treasures those same predecessors [the Autarchs] had left behind.?

As for the words, they are kept fresh in the memory of all Autarchs because they unlock many doors, both doors they use regularly, and doors they and their predecessors have not opened for centuries.  The contents of rooms unopened for centuries are naturally forgotten; the Old Autarch himself pointed out that only his memories will be vivid in the mind of Severian.

You are flailing desperately here, Lee.  The only cure is to reassess your habit of clutching at some random word or even syllable with no connection to the narrative, then asserting it to be proof of some bizarre secret history whilst ignoring its incompatibility with events, characters and storyline.  [In this case, the notion that Typhon would have wished or intended to live on as a pickled homunculus in a jar.  We actually know how he lived on.  And when he met Severian, he did not ask about the homunculus.]

- Gerry Quinn
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