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With that vile instinct every man has to kill whatever may fear him, I fired.
Famulimus trilled, “Though we do not know you, yet you know us, Severian. I saw how pleased you looked, when first you came into our sight. Often we have met, and we are friends.” “But we will not meet again,” I said. “It’s the first time for you, who will travel backward through time when you leave me. And so it’s the last time for me.
In childhood, one imagines that any door unopened may open upon a wonder, a place different from all the places one knows. That is because in childhood it has so often proved to be so; the child, knowing nothing of any place except his own, is astonished and delighted by novel sights that an adult would readily have anticipated.
“How fast we learn, Barbatus, that these poor folk we’ll meet, who hardly know what we know best, know courtesy as guests.” If I had attended to what she said, it would have made me smile.
You must know that a soldier doesn’t serve his officer, or at least, that he shouldn’t. He serves his tribe, and receives instructions from his officer.”
Pain brought me to myself. Perhaps that is what pain is for, or perhaps it is only the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, forged in a smithy we can but guess at, by a smith we do not know.
The most trivial skirmish is not trivial to those who die in it, and so should not be trivial in any ultimate sense to us.
It is seldom wise to permit an enemy mere target practice.
Those who have never fought suppose that the deserter who flies the field is consumed by shame. He is not, or he would not desert; with only trifling exceptions, battles are fought by cowards afraid to run.
I have been such an acolyte, in a creation now vanished. In that too there was a Conciliator and a New Sun, though we did not use those names.
Our universe? Jesus Christ?
Gunnie looked up at the lintel and, as though she read the words there, recited, “No hope for those who enter here.”
Dante's Inferno. Is Severian going to Hell?
Thus every common man who brings a son into the world must feel himself responsible for his woman’s labor and perhaps for her death, and with reason fears that the world will in the end condemn him with a million tongues.
An infant in its crib does not at first know that there is a distinction between its body and the wood that surrounds it or the rags upon which it lies. Or rather, its body seems as alien as all the rest. It discovers a foot and marvels to find so odd a thing a part of itself.
“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”
It occurred to me at last that the ship shaped herself for me as I passed and returned herself to herself for her own uses once I was gone, just as a mother devotes herself to her child when that child is present, speaking in the simplest words and playing babyish games—but pens an epic or entertains a lover at other times.
Tricks are for solipsists, who think everything will pass away.”
The dead man’s hands reached for my throat. I took them in my own, no longer afraid of him or even horrified by him. I felt instead a terrible pity for him and for us all, knowing that we are all dead to some degree, half sleeping as he was wholly asleep, deaf to the singing of life in us and around us.
In writing such a chronicle as this, one wishes always to describe process; but some events have no process, taking place at once: they are not—then are. So it was now. Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.
Certainly more guests came to our aid when Zama broke our door than there was any reason to expect, and I would like to think that one or even several of them were myself. Indeed it sometimes seems to me that I caught a glimpse of my own face in the candlelight that night.
When it is confronted with the incredible, the mind flies to the commonplace;
I searched my memory, which is perfect, except perhaps for a few slight lapses and distortions.
As the striker, so the stricken.
Most do not know it, but it is difficult to learn to strike another human being with all one’s force; some ancient instinct makes even the most brutal soften the blow.
perhaps we are unable to advance some paragon of loyalty to an apothegm only because loyalty (in the final analysis) is choice.
Declan wished to know how Urth would fare when the New Sun came; and I, understanding little more than he did himself, drew upon Dr. Talos’s play, never thinking that in a time yet to come Dr. Talos’s play would be drawn from my words.
The voice of my neighbor floated through the bars. “That was a fine tale. I took notes as fast as I could, and it should make a capital little book whenever I’m released.”
the brown book?
Was it not possible Ymar had reached the Phoenix Throne only because some epopt—myself—had prophesied he would? So far as I am aware, history holds no record of it; and perhaps I have created my own truth. Or perhaps Ymar, now feeling he rides his destiny, will fail to make the cardinal effort that would have won him a signal victory.
Who can say? Does not Tzadkiel’s curtain of uncertainty veil the future even from those who have emerged from its mists?
The present, when we leave it before us, becomes the ...
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In a round structure larger than the rest, I was driven down aisles lined with cabinets and seats until we reached a circular curtain, like the wall of an indoor tent or pavilion, at its center. I had recognized the building by then.
It’s easy—very easy—to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place.”
(Such service is the price of undying loyalty; those who profess it seldom labor quite so diligently as a common servant whose loyalty is to his task.)
Tzadkiel said, “No wonder I accepted you; in all those words there was not one lie.” “I’ve told lies when I thought there was need of them, and even when there was none.”
We love most when we understand that the object of our love has nothing else;
She saved me once when I was a boy, and I remember her face as I remember everything. I would save her now if I could.” Looking at her face, a face of supernal beauty made hideous by its own weight, I asked, “Do you remember that?” “No. It hasn’t yet occurred. It will, because you spoke.”
Severian brings the past into being
Perhaps I was too distant from myself, from the Severian of bone and flesh borne by Catherine in a cell of the oubliette under the Matachin Tower.
Parentage?
The tongues of men are older than our drowned land; and it seems strange that in so great a time no words have been found for the pauses in speech, which have each their own quality, as well as a certain length. Our silence endured while a hundred waves slapped the hull, and it held the rocking of the boat, the sigh of the night wind in the rigging, and pensive expectation.
“‘Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.’”
How terrible it is that we know our stories only when we have lived them!
A moment later I knew also that I was dreaming, that with the crowing of the cock (whose bright black eyes would not again be pierced by the magicians) I would wake to find myself sharing the bed with Baldanders.
Before I had embarked upon the ship of the Hierodules that was to carry me to the ship of Tzadkiel, I had crouched in air, surrounded by circling, singing skulls.
When I reached the mausoleum where I had played as a boy, I found its long-jammed door shut, the force of the onrushing sea having completed a motion begun perhaps a century ago. I laid the skull on its threshold and swam hard for the surface, a surface that danced with golden light.
Like the men I had seen, these women had small eyes, narrow mouths, and broad, flat cheeks. It was a month or more before I understood why these seemed so different from the autochthons I had seen at Saltus Fair, in the market of Thrax, and elsewhere, though it was only that these people had pride and were far less inclined to violence.
So if the Commonwealth is South America, and Nessus is (probably) Buenos Aires, then these autochtons are the Aztec people I guess
“I’ve always remembered everything.” Dissolution was in the air, the fetor of rotting flesh. Famulimus sang, “For that were you chosen, Severian. You and you alone from many princes. You alone to save your race from lethe.”
“We’ve known you half our lives now, Severian, and you’re a weed that grows best when stepped upon.”
“Perhaps death is only horrible to us because it’s a dividing of the terror of life from the wonder of it. We see only the terror, which is left behind.”
“The man whom you saw dead your mother bore. Or so it seems to me from what’s been said.
So all of Severian's resurrections were done by his own power until he died aboard the ship. That's when Tzadkiel "resurrected", or rather cloned him, creating the first (of two) eidolon?
His wife sang, “Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to. Flight.” “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
I don't
All gods are very good, particularly the Sleeper! Without the Sleeper, so many would starve. The Sleeper is very, very great!
