Lupine Aesthetic [Digest urth.v030.n171]

Nigel, et al: I think there's another point about the mysteries to be made. We get both hard ones and easy ones. This is (I think) a deliberate strategy on Wolfe's part, to get us hooked on looking for mysteries and then to get us to look for deeper and deeper ones. Thus in "Peace", the faking of the "Necronomicon" is not very deeply buried, and is easily caught. It's also funny. So the reader is rewarded for noticing it, and encouraged to look for more "easter eggs", as such things are called in the software business. Aha, the name of the orange juice substitute is "Tang"! That was harder but funnier. And so on. The end goal of this sequence of mysteries is, I suspect, to get us to see the whole work as a clue to a bigger, unsolved Mystery-with-a-Captial-M. "As below, so above", but this last one is left unsolved because the point is that Life is a Mystery, in the religious sense (and also in the process vs. result sense). C.f. the end of the "Shadow" trilogy: the whole world is holy, which makes no literal sense (how can the whole world be marked off as special?), but makes good spiritual sense (all that is created bears the creator's imprint). Did I once mention Mozart in this connection? A musician explained to me that interesting music is one which has a pattern we can hear but can't hear at once; since any audience has listeners of different skills, good music has patterns at several different levels of difficulty. Mozart is apparently a master at offering many such levels. -John Bishop