sev's skull

maa32 · 08 Jul 2003, 19:47 · from urth-v0307.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: maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu>
Subject: (urth) sev's skull
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:47:19 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3581 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3581.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

So there is some disagreement over the skull.  I tried to emphasize that=20
perhaps the Severian we knew was just a copy, as the Apu-Punchau who rises=20
over his body is just a copy.  The original Severian has long since died, a=
nd=20
has always been dead, as he says while underground with Master Ultan: I fel=
t=20
as if we were both dead and buried, or something like that.  Why should the=20
chapter entitled "resurrection and death" be any different than the later,=20
heirodule maintained Severian?  If he's not the first Severian (and we meet=20
Ymar in Urth, and Severian says little about being identical to him -=20
something one would certainly note: "he looked just like me as a kid! Go=20
figure!")  I think that when Severian speaks of not being the first Severia=
n,=20
he means that there was a boy raised among the torturers who died and was t=
hen=20
altered and artifically maintained by the Hierodules, who have the ability =
to=20
tamper with time itself - and remember that the conciliator is the master o=
f=20
time.   If the Severian of the narrative of The Book of the New Sun is simp=
ly=20
another eidolon, then surely that could be Severian's skull.
Marc Aramini

--=20

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