textual support for Silk suicide hypothesis

Kevin J. Maroney · 27 Mar 2001, 19:42 · 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: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at ungames.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) textual support for Silk suicide hypothesis
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 19:42:38
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0490 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0490.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 05:52 PM 3/27/01 -0500, Dan P wrote:
>On page 66 of RTTW we get this after a trip to Green and some dream
>analysis:=20

>	"Perhaps her husband goes the gods, as Legerman Leeuw
>suggested, perhaps only out into darkness.  For the moment, it doesn't
>matter.  My point is that he leaves the home she made for him, never
>to return."

I still tend to interpret this as a profound grief to the verge of death
rather than actual suicide. But....

>	I told him, "If you mean you wish to diea when I do, Oreb, I
>sincerely hope you don't.  In Gaon they tell of dying men who kill
>some favorite animal, usually a horse or a dog, so it will accompany
>them in death; and under the Long Sun their rulers went so far as to
>have their favorite wives burned alive on their funeral pyres.  When I
>die, I sincerely hope no friend or relative of mine will succumb to
>any such cruel foolishness."

... this is stronger. I'm not sure why this isn't proof, but it still seems
unconvincing. Maybe I'm just in denial.

>I wouldn't rule out that Silk may not have been thinking
>clearly and simply thought "slash my wrists" without thinking about
>the proper technique (this is apparently quite common in failed
>suicide attempts).  I think Silk the Augur was more accustomed to
>cutting the jugular vein.

Yes, but Silk is a Wolfe hero who knows everything. :-) Also, wouldn't he
have slashed his own throat?

--=20
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://www.nyrsf.com

*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