diff --git a/the-story-of-ymar.md b/the-story-of-ymar.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..48284f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/the-story-of-ymar.md @@ -0,0 +1,138 @@ +--- +title: The Story of Ymar +description: > + An excerpt from Chapter 17 of _The Shadow of the Torturer_ by Gene Wolfe, + with my analysis in comment blocks. +--- +# The Story of Ymar + +Now I begin again. +It has been a long time +(twice I have heard the guard changed outside my study door) +since I wrote the lines you read only a moment before. +I am not certain it is right to record these scenes, +which perhaps are important only to me, +in so much detail. +I might easily have condensed everything: +I saw a shop and went in; +I was challenged by an officer of the Septentrions; +the shopkeeper sent his sister to help me pluck the poisoned flower. +I have spent weary days in reading the histories of my predecessors, +and they consist of little but such accounts. +For example, of Ymar: + + + +> Disguising himself, he ventured into the countryside, +> where he spied a muni meditating beneath a plane tree. +> The Autarch joined him and sat with his back to the trunk +> until Urth had begun to spurn the sun. +> Troopers bearing an oriflamme galloped past, +> a merchant drove a mule staggering under gold, +> a beautiful woman rode the shoulders of eunuchs, +> and at last a dog trotted through the dust. +> Ymar rose and followed the dog, laughing. + + + +Supposing this anecdote to be true, how easy it is to explain: +the Autarch had demonstrated that he chose his active life by an act of will, +and not because of the seductions of the world. + + + +But Thecla had had many teachers, +each of whom would explain the same fact in a different way. +Here, then, a second teacher might say +that the Autarch was proof against those things that attract common men, +but powerless to control his love of the hunt. + + + +And a third, that the Autarch wished to show his contempt for the muni, +who had remained silent when he might have poured forth enlightenment and received more. +That he could not do by leaving when there was none to share the road, +since solitude has great attractions for the wise. +Nor could he when the soldiers passed, nor the merchant with his wealth, nor the woman, +for unenlightened men desire all those things, +and the muni would have thought him one more such man. + + + +And a fourth, that the Autarch accompanied the dog because it went forth alone, +the soldiers having other soldiers, +the merchant his mule and the mule his merchant, +and the woman her slaves; +while the muni did not go forth. + + + +Yet why did Ymar laugh? Who shall say? +Did the merchant follow the soldiers to buy their booty? +Did the woman follow the merchant to sell her kisses and her loins? +Was the dog of the hunting kind, or such a short-limbed one +as women keep to bark lest someone fondle them while they sleep? +Who now shall say? +Ymar is dead, and such memories of his +as lived for a time in the blood of his successors +are long faded. + + + +So mine in time shall fade too. +Of this I feel sure: not one of the explanations for the behavior of Ymar was correct. +The truth, whatever it may have been, was simpler and more subtle. +Of me it might be asked why I accepted the shopkeeper's sister as my companion-- +I who in all my life had had no true companion. +And who, reading only of "the shopkeeper's sister," +would understand why I remained with her after what is, +at this point in my own story, about to happen? +No one, surely. + +I have said that I cannot explain my desire for her, and it is true. +I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. +I felt that we two might commit some act so atrocious +that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible. + +No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death-- +every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, +wrapped in authority older than the universe. +They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. +Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, +and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, +the builders of the unimaginable, +the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence. + +The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. +We say, "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves +(though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) +our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. +One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, +though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves. + +Perhaps, indeed, that is the explanation of the story of Ymar. +Who can say?