Destroying Inhumi

James Jordan · 25 Apr 2001, 22:43 · 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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at home.com>
Subject: (whorl) Destroying Inhumi
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 22:43:46
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0731 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0731.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The Secret, it seems, is a weapon that can destroy the inhumi, but one that=20
may be and likely is too heavy to wield.
	I'd like to go back to something someone suggested, which is that when men=20
are good, and thus Christlike, then such good people will voluntarily give=20
blood as needed to help inhumi become good, as Christ did for humans.=20
Practically, such blood could be deposited in blood banks, analogous to=20
Christ's deposit of His blood in the Eucharist.
	This has not satisfied because transforming the inhumi does not seem to be=20
a weapon to destroy them. But is this the right understanding? SS is=20
clearly a religious as well as a political and personal novel. Twice we=20
have eucharistic scenes. That's no accident: In Christian thought the=20
Eucharist is eating and drinking Christ's death into oneself, so that one=20
can die to one's own evil and be born anew, over and over again. I suggest=20
that to transform the inhumi into true humans is precisely to destroy=20
inhumi, to destroy what makes them IN-humi.
	Pay close attention to the name Wolfe has given them: We humans are=20
usually inhumi, unless we "die" in Christ and are "raised" to a new life.
	In short, I suspect that destroying the inhumi has a religious meaning,=20
not a military one.
	Grist for the mill.

Nutria


*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