Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 08:08:43 -0600
From: "Charles Reed" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Silk's perception of time

Hello all.

I hate to rain on everyone's parade who seems to think that Silk's 
enlightenment occurred at the point where the Whorl dropped out of FTL 
travel (if in fact the Whorl was capable of FTL travel, which I tend to 
disbelieve), but I'm going to.  

At the time Silk was enlightened, the whorl had been in orbit around the 
"short sun" for about thirty years, and therefore could not have been 
going faster than light at any time during Silk's life which, at the 
beginning of NIGHTSIDE, was 23 years long.

Charles



Don Doggett wrote:

>Crush says:
>"Silk is not only "aware" that Time has stopped. He says he was *outside*
>Time. The speed in which Time is moving at the "time" of his enlightenment
>is irrelevant to him since such differences only matters from the
>perspective of persons *in* Time. So the Time stoppage for Silk doesn't tell
>us anything either way."
>
>Don smiles broadly and slaps Crush on the back:
>Actually your objection only strengthens my theory and makes me certain that
>Silk's enlightenment is the point where the Whorl achieves and leaves ftl
>speed.  Allow me to explain.  When we say God, or the Outsider (I'm assuming
>that the consensus is that the Outsider is God), is outside of time what we
>are saying is that God exists in the past, present, and future
>simultaneously and without differentiation.  God isn't in the past, seeing
>the future, or in the future, seeing the past.  God is always NOW.  So if
>Silk is outside of time, with the Outsider (or God) he is seeing the past,
>present, and future as the Outsider sees them, while they are happening.  Of
>course, he can only describe to Horn (or Nettle, or was it Marble?) what he
>saw in terms of past present and future, but in his perception it was all
>now.  Outside of time means immersion in reality, without the barriers of
>time.  In essence, when Silk saw Patera Pike pray to the Outsider for help
>he saw it as it happened (not as a vision of the past), and when he
>perceived that time had stopped in his present, time really had stopped.
>
>
>
>
>
>



--