Sev's not-so-perfect memory

Chris · 15 Jul 2003, 00:09 · 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: "Chris" <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Sev's not-so-perfect memory
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 00:09:06 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0307-3679 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0307/3679.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

To throw more into the fire:
Perhaps, given the "many worlds" cosmology of the NS books, Severian has=20
actually picked up memories from Severians in several different branches of=20
the possible event tree which all had similar enough outcomes that they=20
succeeded and were able to return, become Autarch, and pass their memories=20
on. If the differences were small enough he might not notice that he was=20
remembering it differently from one time to the next. Even larger=20
differences might pass unnoticed if there were enough time between the firs=
t=20
remembrance and whenever he revisits the same subject. It may not be the=20
only or even the best solution, but it's consistent enough and hangs=20
together with the Ash episode.

On a side note, I am not very comfortable attaching the same powers Silk ha=
s=20
(seeming to be able to change stories, including his own) to Severian. The=20
two may be connected, but are not the same. Were there hints in the NS=20
novels that Severian was able to do this? I can't recall any.

Civet

>Crush responds:
>
>>Since they are trivial, they can only be errors in memory (assuming
>>they aren't typos).
>
>They might also be errors in interpretation.  Perhaps Drotte and Roche bot=
h=20
>said it, but at
>one point it was more significant that one said it, and at another time th=
e=20
>other.  Maybe
>Vodalus handed the pistol to Thea with his helper as an intermediary. Afte=
r=20
>a while it starts
>to sound like Biblical exegesis.  Which may be the point.
>
>Tom
>
>
>
>
>--

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online =20
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3D3963

--=20

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