Numerological Wolfe

James Jordan · 22 Apr 2002, 17:01 · from urth-v0204.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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Subject: RE: (urth) Numerological Wolfe
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 12:01:45 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-753 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0204/753.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


>
>And now we see another significance of "Number Five." By this
>generation (which probably isn't the fifth at all; "that number is
>either far too small or too large"), the Wolfes are not even able
>to make it as far as Number Six ("I am not a prisoner...I am a free
>man!"); they are no longer quite human...
>
>--Blattid

Good thot. Either that, or that an evil No. 6 is coming someday, which is=20
how I've taken the last sentence.
         BTW, thematically this feature might be linked to Wolfe's story=20
"To the Seventh" in *Stranger Travellers.* Of course, the seventh here=20
refers to chess, and when the pawn gets to the eighth after dying on the=20
seventh, he becomes a Queen (the bride of Christ). Still, 6 as inadequate=20
and stuck in time versus 7 as fulfilling and completing humanity -- the two=20
stories make a nice complement. The one thing the "Wolfes" in 5HC refuse to=20
do is "die" and be truly transformed.

Nutria


--=20

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