Crush on trial

Chris · 23 Mar 2005, 22:08 · from 2005-March.txt.gz

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From: rasputin_ at hotmail.com (Chris)
Date: Wed Mar 23 22:08:37 2005
Subject: (urth) Re: Crush on trial
In-Reply-To: <001801c52ffc$e3672920$60a3f63f@wynnhouse>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F320F76E4EFE6C6CB289CBE86400 at phx.gbl>

I too thought that was a great reference, and brings into even sharper 
contrast Severian's choice. And I think Crush's words here are revealing of 
something, though I am hesitant to assert exactly what it means. Sev is a 
surgeon for Urth, for his "world". This "world" is not equatable with the 
people on it (almost all of them die) or their future generations (because 
they could just as easily be born on another world, though the proportion 
may or may not be exactly the same). He is not saving his "race", because 
humans already exist elsewhere in the universe and, ultimately, the form of 
life that comes to dominate the rejuvenated world may be human-descended but 
is not necessarily "human" as we'd understand the term. What is Severian 
saving? We could try to answer with a name, "Urth", but even the *name* 
changes (and if name-changes are suggestive of anything, they are 
suggestions that the named entity being referred to has changed).

The fact that the answer to this question ("What is Severian saving?") 
seemed so clear, and yet becomes so murky when we try to focus on it, to me 
indicates that there is more to our intuitive understanding of BotNS than we 
are commonly aware of.

In a side note, I've had a bizarre afternoon. Out of 4 papers I saw 
presented today, all four mentioned torture and 3 of them explicitly used 
the term "torturer" - despite there being little to no reason for that 
subject to even come up. (2 were on abortion, 1 on character issues, and 1 
on addiction). Synchronicity...

-- Civet

>But Sev CAN objectively analyze both outcomes. He's not a Stalin, Hitler, 
>or Ozymandias killing multitudes to remake the world according to some 
>vision in their own minds. He's a surgeon performing triage on a dying 
>world.
>
>~ Crush

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