From Lord Foul's Bane:[Korik] could not forget any detail of the last night he had spent with his wife, whose bones were already ancient in the frozen fastness of her grave. The Vow sustained him, but it was not warm.
Both Korik and Covenant are assailed by erotic memory while doing monotonous tasks dictated by their life disciplines. Korik is pacing on watch and reciting the Vow late at night; Covenant is walking mechanically through downtown (VSEing as constantly as Korik recites the Vow) en route to pay his bill at the electric company.Without warning, a memory of his wife flared in [Covenant's] mind, almost blanking out the sunshine and the sidewalk and the people in front of him. He saw her in one of the opaque nightgowns he had bought for her, her breasts tracing circles of invitation under the thin fabric. His heart cried, Joan! How could you do it? Is one sick body more important than everything?
The heroic youth of the Vow corresponds to Covenant's "golden boy" period when he and Joan are newlyweds and he is writing his first book. Covenant is grasped by transcendence in the experiences of marriage, writing, and parenthood; Korik and brethren are grasped by transcendence in their first sight of Revelstone (and even more so in the generosity of Revelstone's inhabitants). If my "cosmic marriage" theory of the Vow is valid (Revelstone is described in terms suggesting the ancient City as Woman metaphor, and not even a single haploid cell was left outside the Vow to belong to an earthly mate), even the description of how Covenant felt after completing his writing--"as drained and satisfied as all of life's love uttered in one act"--maps onto the morning after the Vow.
After Kevin and Joan, the scar tissue that develops around Korik's and Covenant's world views constricts them into very similar mechanically disciplined existences, although the motivations and goals of the Vow and leprosy self-care are so different.
