From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) Taste of Honey
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 98 04:05:00 GMT

"As URTH makes clear, the Old Autarch's function, both in the story
and in the world, is to prepare the way for Severian. His career and
his trial mark the road the New Sun must follow. So Appian is a
fittingly evocative name for him. `Appian' is close to the Latin
`apia' (bee), an apt name for a servant under the honey steward . .
." (from "The Death of Catherine the Weal and Other Stories," written
in 1992 for Clute's book and still unpublished).

Sigh.  Here's a taste of honey that's far from sweet; one of the last
remaining granules of thunder from an essay that must have bred whole
herds of dust bunnies by now, covering hearth and heath from Hibernia
to the white cliffs of Dover.  Feeley's 1991 essay, which included
some stuff about the honey and the bees, failed to make the Appian
link (or so I thought and still believe)--hence the aformentioned
granule, an erg, a spark that dreamed of being a bolt.

But that's a common enough experience, I'm sure everybody knows
it--you work hard on something, send it off and wait.  Years go by.
Nothing happens--the thing is lost under a rock in a deep cave in the
middle of a black forest at the bottom of the ocean. It moulders
among the boulders.

When things are published, at the very least there's a sense of
closure.  True, the thing might not be read by many (and in that
sense it is almost equivalent to being under a rock, etc.), but it is
done, completed, a matter of record, for better or worse.

Ah well.

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/