I just love these parallel constructions—Bakker’s so good at them and keeps them going in TUC
Knowing precludes being
Intro quote from chapter 14:
“To be a Man is to take the frame of a Man as firmament, to be immovable unto oneself. And to know Man as Man is to be blind to this common frame, to be without knowing. Thus is knowing the corruption ob being. And so to learn what it is to be a Man is to cease to be a Man.”
When Oinaral explains to Sorweel about how few Intact remain:
P. 250 “This is how you know that you stand before the lease of my Race…The fact that I stand lucid and Intact before you.”
P. 254-5 “The Aged coddle me…make grand gesture of all the strife I am spared. At leas some ember of the, they proclaim shall glow long into the black. But for all their fatuous celebration, I am despised just the same. Thus the bitter irony of my curse, Son of Harweel. I am the greatest shame my Kinning has known, a reclusive Scribe among grasping Heroes, and yet only I recall the distinction between honour and corruption…Only I can remember what shame is!”
Sorweel pondering the descent, p. 304:
“Judgment ever belongs to the greater. He saw himself the way the Injori Ishroi saw Men in days of ancient old, as strutting bests, by turns devious and absurd, rotting even as they lived, shouting boasts from atop their barrow-graves. Weed or flower, it did not matter, for their time was too short to count anything but the dregs of glory. Henceforth, his would always be a miscreat life. And so the last of the boy left to the Son of Harweel died in the Weeping Mountain.”
And to go back to the chapter 14 quote—this is the chapter where Koringhus discovers the ‘truth’ of what it is to be Dunyain and then self-destructs.
And, wow TAE is the most fucked up perversion of a coming of age story. Poor Sorweel.
AND! TO READ AND ENJOY BAKKER IS TO NOT BE BAKKER AND TO BE BAKKER IS TO BE BLIND TO THRILL OF READING HIS OWN BOOKS