(urth) torturing BTQ
Jeff Wilson
jwilson at io.com
Thu Jul 23 20:15:34 PDT 2009
James Wynn wrote:
> Okay. Attempting to put it another way, you are saying that the
> question Severian is begging is "Is it possible for one to know for
> certain if one has forgotten or misremembered something?", not "How does
> Severian know he remembers everything?"
Oy!
There's no begging of either question that I can see. Severian feels his
memory is perfect because he can find no gaps in it *and* apparently
neither can Palaemon. Until his attention is drawn to an inconsistency,
any forgetting was both holistic, as if the object of the memory never
existed at all, and trivial, regarding matters that no one else cared
about or remembered and did not involve objective, physical consequences
like being unable to open a door because of forgetting where the keys
were left.
And there may be things excusable as being different in the not-English
idiom the Urthlings use, similar to the way our "I forgot my keys" can
really mean forgetting, or it can mean "I was distracted from my
responsibilities and no attempt at recall was made".
--
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >
More information about the Urth
mailing list