Middlesex

Jeffery Eugenides

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstagged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.

I’m going to tell you a story. This is about Jeffery Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, a book which I have not yet had the privilege of reading. It will be difficult, therefore, to be exactly sure of the points I am going to make and the truth of these words to follow, but we’ll be forging on together with all good faith and optimistically await where we’ll end up.

Not having read Middlesex, I have chosen a quote at random with which to begin: “Of course a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this” (9). It seems like Eugenides has walked himself into the same trap as me. His narrator—Cal or Callie or Calliope—is talking with all certainty of something Calliope could not have known. This is called telling a story. As Winterson says in Passion, “Trust me, I’m telling you stories.”

I’m going to tell you another story: I lied. I have read Middlesex. But this is a story and there must always be an element of fiction in telling. Even telling the truth has some lie. Telling is its own special distortion of reality. But someone has already said this better than me (Yann Martel in The Life of Pi):

Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?...Isn’t telling about something—using words, English or Japanese—already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something of an invention?...The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn’t that make life a story?

Middlesex is a story of telling stories. In Calliope’s story, Cal writes a story, the “Psychological Narrative,” to tell Dr. Luce about Callie’s life. But Cal lies. The “Psychological Narrative” is a fiction and Calliope tells us: “I was making up most of what I wrote” (418) and “Telling the truth wasn’t nearly as much fun as making things up” (418). Cal tells Luce a fiction on which he bases his own report. A report is as much fiction as the fiction it is based on. So we have to admit that Calliope discovers his identity as Cal not through straight fact but through a fiction.

Pay attention to the different names Eugenides’ narrator hails by: Cal, Callie, and Calliope. When I say above that Cal told a story to Luce, I mean exactly that. The portion of Calliope that is accepting most of the type “male”, the part that is beginning to tell the story of a young man (unconsciously) is the part writing the “Psychological Narrative.” Cal’s story for Luce is part of Calliope’s story for us, the readers. Calliope is the muse; Callie is one of her stories and Cal is another. One is more truthful than the other but they are still stories about the same subject.

Lefty’s story as dramatized for Mr. Ford strikes us as a ridiculous sham but it too is a story about Lefty (104). Calliope emphasizes this by placing it very blatantly in a fiction: a drama. Ford’s theatrical is just as much as a story as the story Lefty and Desdemona tell on the ship about their past is. Calliope tells us the story of passengers who themselves told stories about Lefty and Desdemona. Lefty “was said to have been a silk merchant from Smryna who’d lost his fortune in the fire; a son of King Constantine I by a French mistress; a spy for Kaiser during the Great War” (67). The great act Lefty and Desdemona put on is the story they tell the world in order to legitimize themselves. It may be far less truthful than the story Calliope gives us of them earlier: that they are brother and sister, but it is a story about the same subject nonetheless.

What if the telling of something makes it a story? What if life is, as Yann Martel suggests, a story? Calliope tells us that Lefty was “aware that whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was” (67). Are Calliope’s genes a story? Are the definitions she reads of herself in the New York Public Library’s dictionary a story?

When Calliope looks up what she calls “the definition of myself” (431), she says, “Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions” (431). The dictionary tells Calliope a story about herself, that she, in being a hermaphrodite, in being a he, is also a monster (430). Calliope sees the word in the world about her on billboards, signs and streetcorners until her father tells her another story: “It’s a hormonal thing…in the grand scheme of things, no big deal” (433). Each story tells Calliope something about Calliope, just as Cal and Callie tell Calliope different stories of Calliope, Calliope’s genes tell a story. The dictionary’s definitions tell a story. Stories are used to understand ourselves. Stories are genes that tell us bits of what and who we are.

Stories tie us together. Stories twist us in knots with our past and our future. John Steinbeck, in a letter about writing East of Eden, said, “I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them.” Telling and reading a story is the microscope through which we review our genes. As Steinbeck recognized, stories are what give us context, what give us meaning. When we hear stories we are looking into the roots of ourselves, into the hidden definitions within and the knobby types of our exteriors in order to see what parts of us we don’t know.

Ivan Turgenev says in his Faust, “Yes, I repeat; neither she herself, nor anybody else on earth yet knows all that is hidden inside her.” Like the hidden “recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome” that Calliope is singing of, Turgenev is pointing at the mesh within a human being that is undefined and defining. In the mix of the two is truth. Eugenides is telling us the story of stories; how stories are our means of turning up these undefined but still defining parts.

Speaking of these parts, Calliope says, “It was impossible to be in Luce’s line of work without falling back on such stereotypes. He knew their limitations. But they were clinically useful” (417). Stereotypes are stories. All the stereotypes you have ever heard—Mexicans are lazy, women drive badly, men are insensitive—are stories. We allow types and stories to wash over us, to hide the twisted realities that lie beneath because it is easy. But we all have our crocuses hidden beneath and between the skinfolds of a stereotype. We all have our genes, mutated and not, beneath our cultivated exteriors. It is because of this that stories and types cut both ways. As much as a type whitewashes the fence of humanity it also reveals a little bit of that “all that is hidden inside” us that Turgenev spoke of. Afterall, some fences are white, some Mexicans are lazy, and most little girls grow up to be women.

Think about Tessie and Cal’s reunion at the end of Middlesex. Eugenides allows the two characters one of the more melodramatic and even corny scenes in the story. “Don’t you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?” Tessie asks. “This is the way I was.” Cal responds (520). Cal’s “I” and Tessie’s “You” tell stories about the same thing. Tessie’s story is about a little girl named Callie who ran away and did horrible thigns to her body rather than stay the way she was. Cal’s story is about a hermaphrodite who ran away rather than allow horrible things be done to his body.

What would Calliope be without Tessie’s “You,” what would Calliope be without Callie? Calliope tells us “with respect to my father I will always remain a girl” (512). And Calliope also tells us, “Even now, though I live as a man, I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter” (520). The type that was placed on Calliope from birth, that Calliope was Callie, is not mere falsehood, nor is it misunderstanding. It is fiction.

Earlier Calliope told us, “I could become a man without becoming The Man” (518). The types we live among, the types black, novel, child, Mexican, female, epic poetry, father, poor…like Callie, are not misunderstandings or falsehoods; they are all fictions. They are our genes. They are our definitions. But Calliope is telling us no one gene is fully definitive, and no one definition determines how a story will sound when it’s told.

Have you noticed the conspicuous absence of one character yet? As Calliope says, “Surely you’ve guessed by now. That’s right: Jimmy Zizmo” (163). What of this Fard Muhammad? A character named Burton in Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle says:

“I want to see the whole picture—as nearly as I can. I don’t want to put on the blinders of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and limit my vision. If I use the term ‘good’ on a thing, I’d lose my license to inspect it, because there might be bad in it. Don’t you see? I want to be able to look at the whole thing.”

Zizmo and Fard can be blinders.

When Desdemona knows him as a great prophet she remembers that Greeks themselves have always mistrusted whites (161) but then when she knows Fard as Jimmy she asks “Why you don’t like white people? Why you call them devils?” (164). First Desdemona has used the story of the prophet to be her blinder, later she has used the story of Jimmy Zizmo to be her blinder. But as Steinbeck’s Burton suspected, these are too easy, too limiting. Calliope lets us know that Jimmy is just as much Fard. He knows things: that Sourmelina is a lesbian, that Desdemona and Lefty are siblings (164). But what is his biggest complaint? When Desdemona says “You are my brother-in-law” Jimmy Fard responds: “You don’t know me!...You never knew me!...You never knew who I was or where I came from” (164). Jimmy is Jimmy; he was and still is, but he is also Fard Muhammad. Callie is Callie; Calliope still is, but is also Cal.

Remember the two stories I told you in the beginning of this paper? I told you I had never read Middlesex and I told you I lied and that I actually have read Middlesex. These stories are fictions, just like saying Souremlina is a lesbian is a fiction. I’ve given you stories to hear about me. I cannot say one story is the only story. It’s a lot like being in love: you cannot deny a story that says you are in heaven, you cannot deny a story that says you are in hell. But you can tell a story that says you are in heaven just as you can tell a story about life in hell.

Father Mike, the thief and the priest, tells Milton why stories must be fiction and not truth or falsehood:

“That’s how people live, Milt”—Michael Antoniou again, still kindly, gently—“by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything” (179).

Mariette in Ecstasy

Ron Hansen

You are not the first young nun to tell me such things. Especially now in the infancy of your religious vocation, Satan will be tempting you in a hundred ways. When you see Christ or hear Him, you must be mistrusting and wary, for Christ is a Word that does not give voice to the ear but goes directly into the mind. Jesus does not usually speak; Jesus performs and inspires. Also, He does not make Himself present to our human sense but in the holy desires of the will. Jesus impresses His form upon our soul and fills the heart with joy.

Christ said, "You will grow hard, Mariette. You will find yourself afflicted and empty adn tempted, adn all your body's senses will revolt and become like wolves. Each of the world's tawdry pleasures will invade your sleep. Your memories will be sad and persistent. Everything that is contrary to God will be in your sight and thinking, and all that is of and from God you'll no longer feel. I shall not offer comfort at such times, but I shall not cease to understand you. I shall allow Satan to harshly attack your soul, and he will plant a great hatred of prayer in your heart, and a hundred evil thoughts in your mind, and terror of him will never leave you.
"You will have no solace or pity, not even from your superiors. You will be tortured by gross outrages and mistreatment, but no one will believe you. You will be punished and humbled and greatly confused, and Heaven will seem closed to you, God will seem dead and indifferent, you will try to be recollected, but instead be distracted, you will try to pray and your thoughts will fly, you will seek me fruitlessly and without avail for I shall hide in noise and shadows and I shall seem to withdraw when you need me most. Everyone will seem to abandon you. Confession will seem tedious, Communion stale and unprofitable; you will practice each daily exercise of worship and devotion, but all through necessity, as if you stood outside yourself and hated what you'd become. And yet you will believe, Mariette, but as if you did not believe; you will always hope, but as if you did not hope; you will love your Savior, but as if you did not love him, because in this time your true feelings will fail you, you will be tired of life and afraid of death, and you will not even have the relief of being able to weep."

God sometimes wants our desire for a religious vocation but not the deed itself.

Hansen is not the best writer. I don't even think he's a good writer. He has his moments, but there are also those times when he drags and tumbles along with horrible prose--something I am guilty of myself. But whatever his mechanical failings, the story of Mariette in Ecstasy is wonderfully thought out. I admire Hansen's discipline in holding back from fact--sometimes I wish he had had a trifle more. The story of this stigmata, real or feigned, is worthwhile.
Hansen forces you, especially if you are a Christian, to face the reality of a relationship with this being we call Jesus Christ--God. This relationship can be nothing less than a love-affair.
Mariette acts out a love-affair with Christ, often this is described in physical terms that will make you squirm. It sounds weird when you hear someone talk about Jesus as if he were a lover of your body as well as your soul. I meant lover with every dripping connotation it has.
And where there is physicality there must also be pain. In Mariette's case, there is so very much of it. I don't know what to think about this story. The first quote above has as its antidote the last quote above. In between is the promise of the pain. I don't know which way we wander through this story, whether we start with the last quote and proceed to the first or if it is the opposite. Whatever the case, it will make you think about love and pain and faith.
Oscar Wilde said in De Profundis, "Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation for the extraordinary amount of suffering there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul."
How should we go with this? How far are you willing to go?

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

I suppose this is the time I should give you advice.

Beware of Anglo-Catholics--they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents.

How very boring.

Oh don't talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a Pre-Raphaelite picture?

No Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don't know. I don't know if I want love.

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

You'll fall in love, I said.
Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?

Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it's fretful.
Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. Poor Julia, they say, she can't go out. She' got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived, they say, but it's so strong. Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little, mad sin.

Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.
Never the shelter of the cave or of the castle walls. Outcast in the desolate spaces where the hyenas roam at night and the rubbish heaps smoke in the daylight. No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls. Nothing but bare stone and dust and the smouldering dumps. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish hoping for something to put in his sake something marketable, turns away with disgust.
Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had seen her.

Can't they even let him die in peace?
They mean something different by peace.
It would be an outrage. No one could have made it clearer, all his life, what he thought of religion. They'll come now, when his mind's wandering and he hasn't the strength to resist, and claim him as a death-bed penitent. I've had a certain respect for their Church up till now. If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say about them is quite true--that it's all superstition and trickery. Julia said nothing. Don't you agree? Still Julia said nothing. Don't you agree?

It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.

Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby. God forgive me!
The lay brother said: Your friend is so much happier today, it is like one transfigured.
Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby; but he added, You know why? He has a bottle of cognac in bed with him. It is the second I have found. No sooner do I take one away than he gets another. He is so naughty. It is the Arab boys who fetch it for him. But it is good to see him happy again when he has been so sad.

It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up quite plain; to think of all that burning love spending itself on serum injections and delousing powder. When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman.

When you met me last night did you think, Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works? Did you think 'thwarted'?
It was no time for prevarication. Yes, I said, I did; I don't now, so much.
It's funny, she said, that's exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with Nanny. Thwarted passion, I thought.

Oh my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.

But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.
But I do. That's how I believe.

I was drowning in honey, stingless.

Agree? Agree? My dear boy, you're twenty-two.

I don't know what to say about Brideshead Revisited. You get to decide whether conversion is the last spasm of rebel brain matter or the gift of grace to a humble spirit.

The Fisher King

Anthony Powell

He's like Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, said Louise. A diabolical version of Tiny Tim.

Degas is on record as expressing astonishment at the manner in which dangerous implements like a paint-box and paint-brushes are allowed in the hands of even small children, much less irresponsible people. I feel the same about a camera and film.

Come. Let us leaves these pilgrims seeking forgetfulness of the Present in the Promised Land of the Past, he said, Like the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda--so far as I know the first recorded example of queue-jumping--we will make for the water.

Be perplexed. The Fisher King is like standing in a well-stocked and old library full of those ancient works not read of late. It makes you painfully aware of the inadequacy of your own education. Make sure you have a copy of Bullfinch's Mythologies nearby if you will attempt this one.

Faust

Ivan Turgenev

She was sitting by the window; on her knees lay a book which I recognized immediately: it was my Faust. Her face expressed fatigue.

Life is not a joke and not an amusement, life is not even a pleasure...life is hard labour. Renunciation, constant renunciation--that is its secret meaning, its solution: not the fulfillment of cherished ideas and dreams, no matter how exalted they might be--the fulfillment of his duty, that is what ought to concern a man; unless he has put chains upon himself, the iron chains of duty, he cannot reach the end of his life's journey without falling; whereas in our youth we think: the freer, the better; the further you'll go. Youth can be permitted to think that way, but it is shameful to cheer yourself with a deceit when the stern face of truth has finally looked you in the eye.
Goodbye! Previously I would have added: be happy; now I shall say to you: try to live, it is not as easy as it seems. Remember me, not in times of sadness, but in times of reflection, and preserve in your soul the image of Vera in all its untainted purity...once again, goodbye!

I remember one remark of hers: I said to her once that we, people today, are all a little damaged...'There's no point in damaging yourself a little,' she pronounced, 'you should break yourself completely or else not touch...'

When we see and hear words we take them in. They can be the words of falsehood and we can know this and still we take them in. Indeed we have no more defense against them than the other words we have already taken in. And these words seep into us, change us, mold us; we react to them like everything in this world does to everything else. Chemical reaction is a good metaphor to think through this:

Yes, I repeat: neither she herself, nor anybody else on earth yet knows all that is hidden inside her...

There is no inert word.
Turgenev's Faust painfully mulls these thoughts over. It is the story of a mind unsown with words suddenly littered with the seeds of too powerful thought. There is something to be said for naivety, innocence, and even ignorance. They say the Faust cycle is ancient--man has been selling his soul for knowledge for a long time. What else happened in the Garden of Eden?
If anything, Faust will teach you to have a healthy respect for the things you read.
Let that thought settle in and then see the awful sight: the violent sun has risen and is already pining you down: you are reading, you are reading. The thoughts have already hit you and entered and you welcomed them. You couldn't do anything else. You can think me a fool and disagree, but they are in now and nothing you can do can evict them. Welcome these your neighbors forever.
Your knees should be knocking, your stomach should feel sickly. Nausea would appropriate. Is your head spinning? If you see these words you've missed the point. Or perhaps, you've seen the point and decided on something. Here's a bit of Advil:

All this will pass, I know...and if it doesn't pass--well, what of it?--it doesn't pass.

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their feverishly wished for consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fill sup the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air.

Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains, somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession.

I can hear Bonaparte; he didn't last long on his rock. He put on weight and caught a cold, and he who survived the plagues of Egypt and the zero winter died in the mild damp.

We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

I like such kisses. They fill the mouth and leave the body free. To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

There was nothing we wouldn't believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. Our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war.
And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hearts would be waiting behind the door with the dog.
Not all men are as fortunate as Ulysses.

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in wonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.

But I tell you, Henri, that every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

This book will not be what you think it will. I hope you hate it. I hope you love it. Either one would at least be agreeing with Winterson to some extent. If ever there were a book that scrunched your forehead and made your heart thump it would be this--mostly at the same time. What are you supposed to think of a story that insists on reminding you quite often that it is a story, and even more, demands your trust. But it doesn't demand your trust. Winterson's characters simply say "Trust me." It almost loses its imperative qualities. Is she mocking herself? The story is simply too self-aware to be read peacefully.
The Passion does have good things to say, solid feelings to take away. Love is a way of risking all you value. Think about this; it switches the role we generally see love playing. It is not that you risk all you value to love, but love is one of the few ways you can genuinely reach such a stage of vulnerability or self-denial or sacrifice or ruin. Love is not the purpose so much as it is the tool. But tool is a horrible word and does not do the thought justice. Something much more like road, feeling or even Dao.
Frankly it is blunt. Don't let this turn you away. Life is more blunt. There was a time when I would probably have not read much past the second part of this book but hiding is no way to live. I was almost going to say that evil ideas won't harm you if you don't believe them, but this is bull. Evil ideas can seep into you; thoughts are insidious, so beware. Sometimes you have to risk much, but that doesn't mean you cannot keep your guard up.

Foucault's Pendulum

Umberto Eco

It won't be the end of the world.

By the time I was old enough to write, all I could do was read the books that were already written.

But Redemption from what, old Rocambole? You knew better than to try to be a protagonist! You have been punished, and with your own arts. You mocked the creators of illusion, and now--as you see--you write using the alibi of a machine, telling yourself you are a spectator, because you read yourself on the screen as if the words belonged to another, but you have fallen into the trap: you, too, are trying to leave footprints on the sands of time. You have dared to change the text of the romance of the world, and the romance of the world has taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a plot not of your making.

Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle. You've invented hair oil. I don't like it. It's a nasty joke.

Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

If you're a sexual maniac, you don't want sex; you want the excitement of its theft, you want the victim's resistance and despair. If sex is handed to you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you're not interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you be?

Take those who live alone with a dog. They speak to him all day long; first they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dog understands them, he's shy, he's jealous, he's hypersensitive; next they're teasing him, making scenes, until they're sure he's become just like them, human, and they're proud of it, but the fact is that they have become just like him: they have become canine.

Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.

Ma gavte la nata.
It's Turin dialect. It means, literally, 'Be so kind as to remove the cork.' A pompous, self-important, overweening individual chi thought to hold himself the way he does because of a cork stuck in his sphincter ani, which prevents his vaporific dignity from being dispersed. The removal of the cork causes the individual to deflate, a process usually accompanied by a shrill whistle and the reduction of the outer envelope to a poor fleshless phantom of its former self.

For all the response he made, he could have been fast asleep. But that must have been his technique. I talked and talked. The therapy of the word.

There's no redemption; we are all slaves, give us a master, that's what we deserve.

No.

We desire our lives to be grand. Grandly beautiful, grandly strong, grandly pleasurable, grandly painful, grandly horrific, grandly bad--we don't care what the adjective after the adverb is, but the adverb sure as hell better be something strong, that's how we know it has meaning. Eco's Pendulum is concerned with this and along the way concerned with much more. I have seen no better, more comprehensive, survey of occult conspiracies than Foucault's Pendulum. Eco is like a kind father who feels the need to deal out a firm slap here and there to remind us that our heads still remain on our shoulders.
One of Eco's characters, Belbo, repeatedly asks himself one question: whether he is strong enough to stand up--to live his belief. He has grand words that speak of standing, but his life is a poor mockery of these words...at least he thinks it is. It is the question of author or protagonist. Would you be the madman on the corner shouting or the author who sees him for what he is and tells the world about it?
We all want to be the protagonist of the story. We strive to live, we strive to escape death, we even strive to strive and in our ignorance we fail to recognize that we could not be anything else. The story is necessarily about us by virtue of our existence. We want to stand at the end of the world so that we can feel marvelous; we miss the reality that is in itself marvelous--we're standing!
Foucault's Pendulum is a call to humility and it might be the most precise definition of it I have ever come across. This is not self-deprecation, Jacopo Belbo does that, nor is it flattery of others, that would be the realm of the Diabolicals, instead, humility is the clear headed recognition of reality. But I know this is not a full definition. Eco took 600 and some pages to write his, so please have a little mercy and don't hold me to task--read the Pendulum.
It takes our whole life to understand the heavy weight of reality (to understand that part of life is death), so it seems that we will only understand after our life has run its course. While not a paradox, this is problematic. And in looking back, or forward, we find ourselves asking if we were worthy--of many things, one of which is of being understood.