PEACE: The Elm

Michael Straight · 18 Jul 2001, 09:11 · from urth-v0030.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: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: The Elm
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 09:11:47
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0558 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0558.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Roy C. Lackey wrote:

> "The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judge's daughter, fell last
> night."
>=20
> Even if Weer and Eleanor had agreed in advance that the grave tree
> would be an elm, for Weer to associate the fallen mature tree with Eleanor
> and her hobby, then--duh--he must be dead. No matter whose grave it was,
> saplings do not grow to maturity and die, normally, in a lifetime; if
> Eleanor planted that tree, then everyone he knew must be dead, and so must
> he.

Does Weer say that the tree was mature?  Maybe it was a sapling that fell. =20
I don't like that idea.  The language implies a full-sized tree.  If it
were a sapling one would be more likely to say it got smashed or uprooted
by the storm.

I just figured that Weer knows who planted the tree because it was over
his grave, not because he was hovering around as a ghost and watched her
plant it, but that he just has that knowledge because of its connection
to him.   Weer, like the reader on her first time through the novel,
hasn't thought through the implications and realized what it means.

> At one point Weer speaks of being "sicker, even, than I was this winter,
> before Eleanor Bold's tree fell". In the frametale it is early spring, so=
 it
> can be inferred that he remembers a time before the tree fell, although t=
hat
> contradicts the theory that the tree falling is what freed his spirit, wh=
ich
> woke him from the oblivion of death to his frametale existence. Yet his
> account begins after the tree fell. So, which is it? Does his memory exte=
nd,
> in the frametale, for some unspecified length of time before the tree fell
> (perhaps all the way back to when the tree was first planted), or does it
> begin with the tree falling? If the latter, then what did he mean about
> being "sicker" before then?

If Weer's ghost just "woke" with the falling of the sapling in early
spring, then the most recent winter he remembers is the winter before he
died, which, being before the tree was planted, is also before it fell.

-Rostrum

*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