From: "Alice Turner" <al@interport.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v006.n022
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 19:51:46 


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

Wow, we're back in fettle!

>Am I misguided or stating the obvious in guessing that
>Reechy grew up to be Ymar?

No, rana, you're right on the mark.

teliss, I love your locution, but Ultan's mythic Alexandrian Library is
hardly Thecla's "local library!"

Patrick O---neat!

>He's asking us to look (really look) at the final two letters in the word:
>"last."
>
>They are S--the serpent, and t--the knife.
>
>st
>
>They are pictographs. Symbols in their own right. The root of writing, no
>doubt.
>Abstract representations of something else. Isn't there a symbol that
>incorporates both the snake & the sword? Isn't it the symbol of "Doctor"?
Or,
>if you will, "Healer"?
>
>They are also symbols of sounds. They form the word "Est."
>
>They are also the abbreviation of the word "Saint."
>
>As a Saint is (in a sense) an abbreviation of God. Something greater and
>richer embodied in a smaller vessel.

lasrach, this is so nice re BOTNS:

>I would imagine that the version that Thecla & Sev read is similar to the
>one Dr. Talos claims to have based his play on. That is, a colourful,
mythic
>reworking of the "facts", which are more likely to be found in the Brown
>Book, purporting as it does to contain accounts of the original historical
>events upon which the mythological corpus of the time was based....it is
perhaps not
>unreasonable to allow the possibility that the version of tBotNS which
>Thecla gets from the library relates an account from a parallel
Urth>lasrach

And Ratty, you're baaaaaack! Sinking your oversized incisors promptly into
newt's tail---lucky that newts can promptly regenerate their tails. Well,
taking the secular example of Freud and the cigar, I hope you will someday
admit that not every novelistic encounter with water is a baptism, not every
invitation to dine a eucharist. Or is that too much to ask?

-alga-