Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Digest whorl.v010.n104

Alex David Groce · 14 Apr 2000, 12:47 · from whorl-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: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v010.n104
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 12:47:50
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0323 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0323.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hmmm...  This is definitely a possible source of Horn's name, except
that the symbolism is the reverse of (ivory true, horn false).
To wit (from Fitzgerald's Aeneid translation):

"There are two gates of Sleep, one said to be=20
Of horn, whereby the true shades pass with ease,=20
The other all white ivory agleam=20
Without a flaw, and yet false dreams are sent=20
By this one through the ghosts of the upper world."


So if this is intentional, it's an allusional argument for
Horn's veracity as a narrator.  Or, at least, for his veracity
in the sense of prophecy and access to the underlying truth of
events (which is usually what is assigned to dream-truth).


"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com




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