From: "James Wynn" 
Subject: RE: (urth) PEACE: Weer's Room
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 14:08:38 -0500

I haven't read Peace but I'll offer that in alchemy, the "egg" is associated
with the coffin.

-- Tuppence tossing Crush
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Andre-Driussi [mailto:mantis@siriusfiction.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 1:47 PM
To: urth@urth.net
Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: Weer's Room

Stone Ox wrote:
>When the falling of the elm awakens Weer, he finds himself
>in a room with a fieldstone fireplace.  He seems to have
>been intermittently awake between his death and the fall
>of the tree, but to have lived mainly in this room.  Where
>is this room?
>
>Consider its shape.  It's described as a long walled-in
>porch, and it has a stone (fireplace) at one end.  It's
>Weer's coffin.

Very nice!  Have we ever seen that before?  I don't think so.  Gotten
close, with "the memory mansion is all inside the hollow skull" stuff, via
the Necronomicon passage.

It leads to another interesting possibility: what if the physically real
foundation of the memory mansion is, somehow, the other coffins at the
cemetary where Weer is presumably buried (if he is not buried on the
grounds of the physical memory mansion, ala Elvis at Graceland)?  Thus,
some (all?) of the rooms he visits are really just the coffins of others?
And it really is a confused tour of a necropolis.

(Because we have often wrestled with the interface between Weer's AD 2274
environment and the physical world, if such an interface actually exists.
If the mansion really exists, call it Weerland, then he is a ghost haunting
that place, thinking that he is somehow the last man on Earth; if the
mansion does not exist, then what is he conflating with the idea of the
mansion?)

About that first room: he seems to think it represents the real mansion
that he moved to from his tiny apartment, a place he lived in from around
age 50 to his death at 60-something.  This would be the place that had the
garbage disposal in the kitchen sink, for example.

=mantis=



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