(urth) Who's Right?

[Jeff Wilson]

On 12/2/2010 10:45 PM, Ryan Dunn wrote:
> So here... am I alone in deducing that Severian the Apprentice senses
> Severian the Lame at his back, about to knock on that door in the
> future?

I believe this is the masking motif's sibling motif of intuition and 
sophistry used to build the theme of inevitable and simple truth being 
revealed by the attempts to hide it.

Sev feels watched and  presumes that the watcher had followed him 
through the tunnel. He turns and the sense of being watched is explained 
by Valeria who lives there. But, he *was* being followed by his future 
self, as we see in the latter passage. Both intuitions were correct, 
though it did not seem so at the time.

That said, I think Apprentice Sev is sensing the slightly earlier Lame 
Sev in the tunnel when he is earnestly following the younger's boot 
prints. By the time Lame Sev makes it into the atrium, his thoughts are 
all on Valeria. If it were merely presence, there would be nothing 
special about the atrium, as Severian commonly goes places he has 
already been to in years previous.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >