Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 07:25:29 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: Re: (urth) The cenoby files

Roy wrote:
>No, no. Your reading of the text is correct; she did not see the trunk on a
>visit 184 years ago. As I said in the second paragraph: "But both trips to
>the attic came after Rose's death."

It might just be me, but I find myself confused to distraction by your use
of number of trips in this case.  (Not that it is your fault, just that it
is all confusing.)  I mean, we are really talking about three trips: the
"last one" 184 years ago (year 148) and two trips on a day in year 332.  If
you are saying that the two trips in 332 happened after Rose's death, I
agree with you, but I don't understand why you are bringing it up.

>>Thus, it resolves: the last time she went up into the attic she was a maid,
>>then she put away her maid gear and became a sibyl, at which point =someone
>>else= put her footlocker up in the attic, and now she enters the attic to
>>see an unfamiliar trunk which is her forgotten old life.  Her supposition
>>about the amount of time since anybody else had been up there is simply
>>wrong.
>>
>>Or am I once again missing something?
>
>She may have been wrong, on the first of those two trips to the attic, about
>it being 184 years ago when, still a graceful girl, she had last pulled down
>those attic steps--I have no way of knowing. She may be wrong, too, about no
>one else having been up there in over a century (the amount of time the
>door-hooking tool had been lost)--again, I have no way of knowing. But was
>she also wrong about having been a teacher and sibyl for only fifty-odd
>years? She said she started teaching when Pike was a young augur. If she was
>right about teaching only for the last fifty-odd years, then that trunk
>can't hold her old maid gear; not if no one has opened that attic door for
>more than a century. That's why I'm puzzled.

If I understand it correctly, all Marble has to be wrong about is her guess
that it has been a century or more since someone went up there.  The trunk
is there, ergo someone was up there fifty years ago to drop off a trunk
(not to clean the attic, mind you, just drop off a trunk: so the trunk
itself has only 50 years of dust upon it while the attic has nearly the
amount of two centuries!).

=mantis=



--