Gene Wolfe - two carpenters

(unknown) · 26 Apr 2007, 06:02 · from rec.arts.books.2007.mbox

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From: Jacket Dust <Use-Author-Supplied-Address-Header@[127.1]>
Subject: Gene Wolfe - two carpenters
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:02:19 +0200
Message-ID: <4144ea0fb3404d4b6e1ab8a74b14dbfe at msgid.frell.theremailer.net>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.books,alt.religion.christian,alt.atheism

by John Farrell
First Things http://www.firstthings.com
April 2007

..Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun" started out as a long novella 
and rapidly grew to a four-volume science-fiction tour de force. The 
hero, Severian, is a lictor--a professional torturer--whose entire life 
has been dedicated to the infliction of agony. "It has been remarked 
thousands of times," Wolfe once said, "that Christ died under torture. 
Many of us have read so often that he was 'a humble carpenter' that we 
feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one 
ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, 
and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a 
carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a 
carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few 
seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a 'humble 
carpenter,' the only object we are specifically told he made was not a 
table or a chair, but a whip."...
==========
John 2:15 http://snipurl.com/1hzg9

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