It won't be the end of the world.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.
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.
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.
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