"'...their psychology isn't truly human. You and I are mixtures, good, bad, and indifferent qualities; our conflicts we always have with us. But the Gwydiona seem to concentrate all their personal troubles into these few days.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT XII, p. 654.
Flandry's legacy would have been immense so it is kind of appropriate to cite a title containing his name while discussing a work that is set long after his death and that does not refer to him even as a historical or legendary figure.
"...our conflicts we always have with us..." echoes a Biblical phrase. Raven, the speaker in this passage, summarizes the human condition. Meditation is about facing our inner conflicts and "mixtures" whereas the Gwydiona, while claiming to acknowledge the Night Faces, elaborately conceal from themselves their own dark side. They could be incorporated into the rest of civilization provided that medical and police measures were taken to confine them with the indole from baleflower for a short while every few standard years. In fact, outside those periods, their sanity and creativity would make major contributions to civilization.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
It's been a VERY long time since I last read THE NIGHT FACE, but I have my doubts it would be that easy to help the Gwydiona. The impression I get from both memory and your blog comments is that these people have become genetically predisposed to NEED to go mad when the Bale flower ripens. To correct or reverse this genetically based addiction/insanity would seem to be both very difficult and require ruthlessly coercive measures.
We do see mention of Gwydion once more, in "The Sharing of Flesh," during the Allied Planets era after a new interstellar civilization had arisen. And the only thing the AP could think of was to interdict Gwydion from all off planet contact. No one was allowed to land there and the decree was to leave the Gwydiona strictly alone.
Sean
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