Increate on trial

Adam Stephanides · 01 Apr 2005, 11:59 · from 2005-April.txt.gz

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: adamsteph at earthlink.net (Adam Stephanides)
Date: Fri Apr  1 11:59:34 2005
Subject: (urth) Re:  Increate on trial
In-Reply-To: <200503291117.j2TBHpBc077353 at mailserver3.hushmail.com>
Message-ID: <BE72C5B3.4C6EC%adamsteph at earthlink.net>

on 3/29/05 5:17 AM, thalassocrat at nym.hush.com at thalassocrat at nym.hush.com
wrote:

> Roy says inter alia:
> 
>> As I've said earlier, the destruction of Urth was largely a
>> symbolic
>> punishment; symbolic because Urth was man's ancestral birthplace,
>> and
>> mankind was dispersed too far and wide in the galaxy (galaxies?)
>> for the
>> Hierogrammates to overcome entropy (135) and hit mankind all at
>> once. 
> 
> I feel that "symbolic" and "punishment" must both be wrong,
> somehow. 

Agreed. As I read it, the punishment was placing the black hole in the Sun,
and the New Sun is the lifting of that punishment. Tzadkiel's words to
Severian at the "trial," and Apheta's words afterwards, make no sense if the
coming of the New Sun is supposed to be a punishment.

> Similarly, when Alpheta tells Sev that Urth is not impportant, I
> think she is lying, as she lied about humanity not being important.

Apheta says as much on p. 162.

> It must be that Ushas is a necessary part of the Plan. And it must,
> 
> somehow, be necessary for the victim to consent in the sacrfice, by
> 
> the assent of Sev as Epitome.
> 
> I don't claim to know from the text why this should be the case,
> but if it isn't, I don't think the narrative makes any sense.

Again, I agree.

> (Personally, I find the idea of one person exemplifying the whole,
> and the idea of a Greater End requiring the death of multitudes, to
> 
> be quite repellant.

Once more, I agree.

--Adam

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