Dan,
I lived in Bangkok for a time, and saw Buddhist monks in their saffron yellow robes daily. In daily life, at least among English-speakers (and TBOTNS is written in English), the terms were used interchangeably. Certainly no one referred to the robes as orange, and as they became well worn (monks are poor) they faded. It is far more likely that the robes refer back to Buddhism than to the odd American Hare Krishna cult.
Rostrum,
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I wonder if there could be some difference attributable to Severian's memory.
Well, of course, but by itself that just doesn't seem quite enough for her powerful presence.
Tony,
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Yes. Jonas is a sailor, so it would be natural for him to regard a ship, or perhaps all space, as his home.
That's not quite what I meant, as I was speculating about his home world, but of course you are right, and I think he does exactly that.
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I've always assumed that Jonas simply escapes to a -place- where he
can be repaired, rather than a time. (A place in our universe, that is, rather than some other.) One of the worlds of the Hierodules, perhaps, or some other planet that still has a viable technology.
That must be right. I know who could fix him up! Well, maybe Ossipago could, but I was thinking of--oh, what is his name?--the talus-maker on the Whorl. You know for sure he's going to turn up again--Silk's gonna need them Tall Asses.
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Robert and Marie, too, could
have come from that place.
I think if they come from anywhere it's the past rather than a parallel Earth, since it's implied pretty strongly that the Botanical Gardens extend into Urth's past. But don't forget that they may simply be "chant-caught" contempories of Severian. I've always loved that scene for its tantalising ambiguity.
Me too. And for the old-movie quality. Yes, I agree with you. I was just scratching my head about Jonas, who certainly comes from the past, but not that far into the past.
Chris,
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The autarch mentions he has a pharmacon similar to the alzabo, but not the same. No doubt it was much more effective to bring hundreds of personalities into another person.
Yes, but Thecla's presence is very powerful long before Sev takes the pharmacon. For me, it's just a little something that I wish Wolfe had bothered to clear up. Oh, well, let's just call it the Claw's influence.
-alga-
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It is far more likely that the robes refer back to Buddhism than to the odd American Hare Krishna cult.<
Probably they go back to Buddhism. According to Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha made his robes from the cloth strewn around the Ganges, funeral wrappings, menstural napkins, and all that stuff. They were mostly saffron, I imagine. Apply whatever symbolism you want from that to the BotNS, if you'd like. Interestingly enough, Mahayana is the vehicle of Buddhism in which the robes of the modern-day followers are not saffron, in my experience. Pure Land and Zen robes are black.
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Jonas, who certainly comes from the past, but not that far into the past.<
Careful there. Jonas knew of Korea and the Korean language (he could tell KLS's nationality from his name), so he comes from a time not too remote from modern Korea because a significant amount of linguistic drift has not occurred.
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That must be right. I know who could fix him up! Well, maybe Ossipago could<
Ossipago and Sidero worry me. I wonder if they are relics from a past science, kept in repair but no longer made (like the fliers), or if they are still produced. Do the Hierodules still have the ability to heal Jonas?
Christopher R. Culver <crculver at aol.com>
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On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Alice Turner wrote:
I wonder if there could be some difference attributable to Severian's memory.
Well, of course, but by itself that just doesn't seem quite enough for her powerful presence.
Chris,
The autarch mentions he has a pharmacon similar to the alzabo, but not the same. No doubt it was much more effective to bring hundreds of personalities into another person.
Yes, but Thecla's presence is very powerful long before Sev takes the pharmacon. For me, it's just a little something that I wish Wolfe had bothered to clear up. Oh, well, let's just call it the Claw's influence.
It depends on how the drug works. And what it's like to have a memory like Severian's. And whether you can draw a sharp line between memory and self.
If Severian's memory is more analogous to a perfect hard-drive, then I agree that simply having Thecla's "files" on his hard drive would not be sufficient to account for the way Severian seems to almost become part-Thecla.
But imagine instead that it's more like what Larry Niven describes in
World of Ptavvs, where when a telepath reads a person's mind, the two personalities struggle within the brain to deterine which is the "host" and which is the "visitor," and if the visitor's personality is strong enough, the brain may end up convinced that the visitor is actually it's real, host, personality, even after the telepathic link is broken. A poor and totally unjust description of Niven, but it's the best I can do. Read the book instead, it's one of Niven's better ones, IMHO.
Anyway, imagine that having a perfect memory is not just having information at hand, but having a greater degree of continuity with your past self--since you can remember exactly how you felt when you were six, and not just project back, you might even be able to get a sense of how your six-year-old self would have thought/felt about current events.
For Vodalus, et. al., with their weaker version of the alzebo drug, they spend a few minutes where their memories and personality become intermixed with Thecla, but then the experience becomes a memory, subject to degredation, only imperfectly recalled.
For Severian, however, remembering the experience perfectly may be indistinguishable from having the experience. He doesn't just have Thecla's files, he's got her "operating system," and he doesn't just have it on a hard drive, accessible when he chooses, but always loaded in RAM.
The autarch alzebo drug is stronger, so the autarchs never quite forget, (or never quite stop having--is there a difference?) the experience of communion with earlier autarchs.
-Rostrum
Urth Net