Urth Net

← back to the conversation

BLUE religion notes

Alex David Groce · 07 Oct 1999, 14:04 · 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) BLUE religion notes
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 14:04:14
Message-ID: <whorl-v0010-0066 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0010/0066.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Nor, for that matter, had Severian become a perfected being in URTH.  Despi=
te
the Christ-imagery, none of Wolfe's heroes are Christ.  They're better view=
ed
as apostolic, blessed figures--performing miracles left and right, wiser th=
an
than have any right to be, aided by the forces of nature, but decidedly not
part of the Godhead, and still capable of moral failure.

I suspect the New Vironese motive for the "goose chase" is self contradicto=
ry--
the five who send Silk probably want to get rid of Horn, and have some of t=
he
motives of squashing this "new religion," but I suspect some of them (perha=
ps
the same ones harboring those motives) are also guilty of "Silkism" themsel=
ves,
those who knew Silk especially.  Glorifying Silk is part of the problem, th=
ey
may think, but they also may suspect that if Silk shows up it will "fix
everything."  Such mixed motives (and in some cases the right idea for the
wrong reasons or wrong idea for the right reason) are typical Wolfe.  Does
anyone else think that behind the stuttering Remora knows a LOT more about
things than even Horn thinks he does--he's seen Neighbors or some such, and
I suspect he knows who the fourth on Mucor's island is, although he won't
answer any questions.


"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