(urth) inhumi secret

[Daniel Petersen]

Very good.  We need to see more application of his essay on Tolkien to his
own works.  It's easy to get so lost in his intricacies and tensions that
we lose sight that the works do, in some fashion, 'argue' for certain moral
and political beliefs and practices.  I actually think Short Sun is one of
the more 'obvious' examples, perhaps often missed because it is also one of
the densest and most elliptical.  (I would add that his parent-child
dynamic is rich and poignant - not 'sermonic', in the negative sense - so
whatever your politics you can *feel *some of the good familial pathos and
be freshly 'sensitized' if nothing else.)

-DOJP

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Jerry Friedman
<jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>wrote:

> > From: nate jarvis <natejarv at gmail.com>
> > If everyone on Earth stops having sex or doing needle drugs for what?
> > a year? then we all go and get AIDS tests, then AIDS is cured.
> >
> > THAT sounds more likely than everyone being nice to one another to
> > wipe out vampire-like monsters they'd rather lynch.
> >
> > Horn seems to to feel if he revealed the secret it would spell trouble
> > for the inhumi as well.
>
> Thanks to Andrew Mason for pointing out the "too heavy for our hands"
> line, which I'd forgotten.
>
> Also, even if one person or a few people start treating others better, it
> would be bad for the inhumi.  And it would help others treat each other
> better, which in turn would help others.  In particular, if people raised
> their children better, the children would grow into better people, and so
> forth--and I don't need to say that parents' effects on their children are
> an important theme of BotSS.  I think Wolfe wants us to picture this
> and connect people's effect on the inhumi to parents' effect on their
> children.
>
> (What would happen if an inhumu got the Rajan's personality or
> spirit or ka or whatever they get?)
>
> On the subject of Wolfe recommending an impossible spreading
> transformation of society, let me quote some non-fiction, "The Best
> Introduction to the Mountains":
>
> "He [Tolkien] uncovered a forgotten wisdom among the barbarian tribes who
> had proved (against all expectation) strong enough to overpower the
> glorious civilizations of Greece and Rome; and he had not only uncovered
> but understood it. He understood that their strength -- the irresistible
> strength that had smashed the legions -- had been the product of that
> wisdom, which has now been ebbing away bit by bit for a thousand years.
>
> "Having learned that, he created in Middle-earth a means of displaying it
> in the clearest and most favourable possible light. Its reintroduction
> would be small -- just three books among the overwhelming flood of books
> published every year -- but as large as he could make it; and he was very
> conscious (no man has been more conscious of it than he) that an entire
> forest might spring from a handful of seed. What he did, then, was to plant
> in my consciousness and yours the truth that society need not be as we see
> it around us.
>
> [Government chains us.]
>
> "It need not be so. We might have a society in which the laws were few and
> just, simple, permanent, and familiar to everyone -- a society in which
> everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same
> changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were. When we had it,
> we would also have a society in which the lack of wealth was not reason for
> resentment but a spur to ambition, and in which wealth was not a cause for
> self-indulgence but a call to service. We had it once, and some time in
> this third millennium we shall have it again..."
>
> Jerry Friedman
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-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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