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DerynifanK

March 17, 2024, 03:48:44 PM
Happy St Patrick's Day. Enjoy the one day of the year when the whole world is Irish.

Thoughts on Cathan's murder I'm sharing as they have been bugging me for ages

Started by whitelaughter, February 15, 2019, 11:32:34 PM

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Salic

I find Cathan's love for King Imre mystifying.  It was certainly a love that was morally ambiguous, given that Imre was a tyrant and was effectively undermining Deryni and human community relations.  Cathan's love seems to have been indifferent to the common good as was understood by his father, Camber of Culdi.

What was Cathan's idea of the common good of Gwynedd?  What did he hope to accomplish by the love and loyalty that he gave to King Imre?  I do not have any answer to these questions.

DesertRose

I suspect that by the time Cathan died, he was in a place of still loving the king he'd grown up with while not really liking or finding his actions comprehensible.

Sometimes it's like that; you love the history of your relationship (by which I mean anything from friendship to familial relationships, not the romantic/sexual specificity the term has acquired in contemporary English) more than you really love the person anymore, because they've changed or you've changed or you both have.
"If having a soul means being able to feel love, loyalty, and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans."

James Herriot (James Alfred "Alfie" Wight), when a human client asked him if animals have souls.  (I don't remember in which book the story originally appeared.)

Salic

Quote from: DesertRose on April 02, 2023, 05:31:41 PMI suspect that by the time Cathan died, he was in a place of still loving the king he'd grown up with while not really liking or finding his actions comprehensible.

I wonder, DesertRose, if he was, somehow an enabler of Imre's actions.  He had seen up close the actions of the young Prince for many years and had to, at a certain point, give his acquiescence.  He was quiet to the faults of the King.

QuoteSometimes it's like that; you love the history of your relationship (by which I mean anything from friendship to familial relationships, not the romantic/sexual specificity the term has acquired in contemporary English) more than you really love the person anymore, because they've changed or you've changed or you both have.

This is an interesting idea.  Cathan, like king Imre, is to be perceived as self-absorbed, not able to see himself as others, such as his father, Camber, sees him, for many years in his childhood.  Cathan, like Imre, cannot, in the end, suffer contradiction.  But all this changes when he gets older and perceives King Imre as a possible danger to himself and to his family.  The comforting self-absorption of childhood cannot absorb personal danger and its accompanying fear.