Agia's Weapons

David Stockhoff · 21 Dec 2011, 16:04 · from 2011-December.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:04:45 -0500
Subject: (urth) Agia's Weapons
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W14BCB1DEB4183587338F38CFA50 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W14BCB1DEB4183587338F38CFA50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4EF2039D.3050007 at verizon.net>

On 12/21/2011 10:35 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
> This assymptotic pattern is repeated often enough that I think it is 
> intentional by Wolfe. He wants there to be progressively more 
> difficult solutions to figure out but he doesn't want there to be any 
> complete and final answers to his mysteries. By this principle, Wolfe 
> himself does not know where the line should be drawn between likely 
> solutions and red herrings or reader invented speculation. 

I have often thought this but have not found a way to describe it.

> Severian fears the Old Leech's methods of gaining knowledge involve 
> the torture of children (shades of Baldanders). I find the Old Leech's 
> pedophillic tendencies to be complementary to Father Inire's 
> fascination with young women (not to mention Dionysus/Pan ;- ). 

Could pedo/hebephilia not be a clue to a deeper evil rather than a sign 
of identity? That is, if again we consider the Cthulhu-worship model of 
how humans may descend to absolute depravity (always more useful to me, 
for some reason, than silly "satanism"), a willingness to manipulate 
others---perhaps especially through sexual sadism or slavery---at least 
predisposes one to further corruption. And if there is "real" evil in 
Severian's world, then it will find that willingness and bring it to 
fruition. Thus, Hethor's use of sorcery, Agia's use of every weapon 
available, the Leech's (and possibly Baldander's) abuse of children in 
the pursuit of further knowledge and power, and the undines' blind hope 
that an executioner autarch will see things their way.

BTW, making Inire the source of all these seems to defeat the point of 
evil---if evil had a point source it would be a disease, not a moral choice.

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