Palaemon's exile

Charles Dye · 08 May 1998, 13:25 · from urth-v0010.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: raster at highfiber.com (Charles Dye)
Subject: (urth) re: Palaemon's exile
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 13:25:48
Message-ID: <urth-v0010-0110 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0010/0110.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com> writes:

> [snip]  Remember, the scene that I cited was of Winnoc (the Pelerine
>slave) recounting being whipped by Palaemon.  [bobbitt]
>
>Incidentally, Palaemon's behavior and words when he sends Severian on
>his way are very odd.  First he claims that Thrax is by the sea.  Then
>he tells Severian to pay attention to his good advice but remarks that
>Severian would probably forget it all.  Palaemon, who we are told
>elsewhere was fond of Severian for his perfect memory.

I don't find the first error odd at all.  Palaemon, who is sending
Severian into exile, is naturally reminded of his own exile.  Severian
is heading upriver, but old Palaemon is confusing it with his own
journey downriver to the coast.  Winnoc, you recall, was "planning to
sign aboard a certain ship" when he got an offer from the Pelerines.
Winnoc was still in his hometown, where Palaemon presumably beat him,
since he made a side trip to visit his mother before leaving.

Palaemon also gets in a sly evasion in this chapter.  He states that
guild members have been dispatched before, "though whether those were
such cases as this the chronicles do not say."  He doesn't tell
Severian that he doesn't know; he just reports what "the chronicles"
have to say!

raster at highfiber.com

*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