Babbie and Horn: In A Pig's Eye

William Ansley · 23 Aug 2000, 23:23 · from whorl-v0011.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: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Babbie and Horn: In A Pig's Eye
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 23:23:25
Message-ID: <whorl-v0011-0163 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0011/0163.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 2:35 PM -0500 8/23/00, Robert Borski wrote:
>
>Secondly, as Mucor says her goodbye to Horn from the cliff, there is this
>passage:
>
>"At the top of the cliff, I saw a small dark figure that seemed almost a
>cluster of boys, or two men upon their hands and knees. It vanished, then
>reappeared as it made a flying leap from the top of the cliff. For the
>moment I thought its target was the sloop, and that it would strike it and
>die. It sent up a waterspout five cubits from the tip of the bowsprit,
>however, and vanished as if it had sunk like a stone." (OBW, 105)
>

[...]

>Almost certainly the "cluster of boys, or two men on their hands and knees"
>is a Neighbor. Given that "it" jumps into the water, and Babbie suddenly
>appears, I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude they're one and the
>same.

Almost certainly, it will surprise no long-time readers of this=20
discussion list, least of all you Robert, that I disagree strongly=20
with this interpretation. It is just so *unnecessary*!

It is *completely* certain to me that an eight-legged creature=20
one-third(?) the height of a man will look more like a cluster of=20
(shorter than a man) boys or two men on their hands and knees (short=20
- because doubled over - and with eight leg-like - because of=20
position - limbs) than a Neighbor, who is as tall as or taller than a=20
man and has only four leg-like limbs (and, of course, four arm-like=20
ones).

Perhaps the point Wolfe is trying to make here is that, even after=20
being on Blue so many years, Horn (and, presumably, most over people=20
born on the Whorl) still are not used to the fact that almost all the=20
native wildlife has at least twice as many limbs as is "natural." (I=20
am sticking with my belief that the leatherskin may have 12 legs,=20
which I stated in a message months ago.)


--=20
William Ansley

*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