Time, Not Cloning

Jeff Wilson · 02 Aug 2013, 23:34 · from 2013-August.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: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2013 18:34:50 -0500
Subject: (urth) Time, Not Cloning
In-Reply-To: <CAJ8=rthN3=o_gFFW+XBVFVq-h-yF8-PBz7hrPM2xEmpp7hENKg at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BLU175-W514247F7A2815481975C8ECF510 at phx.gbl>
	<2c74269117e9361547d8255468339b68.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
	<1375471490.34006.YahooMailNeo at web84504.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<CAJ8=rthN3=o_gFFW+XBVFVq-h-yF8-PBz7hrPM2xEmpp7hENKg at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <b7555446e298b9f643264320be88ebfa.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>


On Fri, August 2, 2013 14:27, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> ... and all this leads around to the question of whether Severian (the
> Severian we know, who is "not the first Severian") is himself a _khaibit_
> or "shadow...thus the real meaning of the title.


I've always taken this to mean his previous time-loop instances, or from
earlier drafts of the life-play he finds himself in. I suppose it is
natural for him to think of himself as the continuing entity rather than
the corpses he doesn't particularly identify with.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >

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