Wintry thoughts on Wolfe

Adam Stephanides · 20 Feb 2003, 20:17 · from urth-v0302.mbox · original

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Wintry thoughts on Wolfe
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 14:17:40 -0600
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on 2/19/03 4:40 PM, Michael Andre-Driussi at mantis at siriusfiction.com wrote:

> To begin, I did not intend to badger Adam Stephanides at all, and if that
> is how it was taken by anybody then I apologize.

No problem.  I just wasn't clear where you were coming from.

> Of course I thought of these examples, too, but I thought that, for
> example, Rush and Once a Day (of ENGINE SUMMER) might be already ruled out
> by Adam's knock against "obsessive love" wrt TAD and TBOTLS.  In fact, I
> sense that the situation in TAD might be very much like the situation in
> not only ENGINE SUMMER but also LITTLE, BIG.

To clarify what I was talking about with TAD and TBOTLS (and, rereading what
I wrote, I see I was unclear), what I was trying to point to was not the
obsessive nature of Green and Silk's loves, but that each of them seemed
uninterested in relating to his inamorata as a person, in having a
"communion of souls," so to speak (and I realize this is still pretty vague,
but it's the best I can do right now).  Green doesn't seem to need a
relationship at all; he's happy just to be near Lara.  He's not at all
perturbed when she tells him that she can only love him as she would love a
dog.  As for Silk, my memory of TBOTLS is not that good, as I said; but my
recollection was that the "Hyacinth" Silk loves is largely a creation of his
imagination.  Both Rush and Smoky, on the other hand, do seem to want to
relate to their beloveds as people, to go beyond the images that they have
of them in their mind and really know them; though you could argue that they
both fail.

--Adam

--=20

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