RTTW spoilers, crutch of Horn

Adam Stephanides · 18 Feb 2001, 20:40 · from whorl-v0012.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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) RTTW spoilers, crutch of Horn
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 20:40:39
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0286 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0286.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 2/17/01 10:36 PM, Michael Andre-Driussi at mantis at sirius.com wrote:

> On to the new topic: if we can agree that "Horn is a crutch," and I can
> readily go along with that, then suddenly I find myself asking "why?"

Good question.  There are actually two questions: why does Horn's spirit go
away, and why does it go away when it does?  Both are mysteries.  I can't
help thinking it must have something to do with the "coincidences" that Horn
is dying at the same time that Silk is either dying or attempting suicide,
and that the Neighbor picks Silk's body to transfer Horn's spirit into.

The thought occurred to me that maybe in some non-literal sense Silk and
Horn are the same person even before the spirit transfer, that Horn is the
Silk who didn't run back after Hyacinth but followed the plan of Pas, as
Mint put it (the twin-theme you mention again).  I don't know if this makes
any sense or not; I'm just throwing it out as possible food for thought.

--Adam

*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