Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

coincidence was disturbing. But why thosepassages and not others?

Today I reinterpretBelbo's files, the whole story they tell, in the light of thatquotation file. I tell the passages like the beads of a hereticalrosary. For Belbo some of them may have been an alarm, a hope ofrescue. Or am I, too, no longer able to distinguish common sensefrom unmoored meaning? I try to convince myself that myreinterpretation is correct, but as recently as this morning,someone told me¡Xme, not Belbo¡Xthat I was mad.

On the horizon, beyondthe Bricco, the moon is slowly rising. This big house is filledwith strange rustling sounds, termites perhaps, mice, or the ghostof Adelino Canepa...I dare not walk along the hall. I stay in UncleCarlo's study and look out the window. From time to time I steponto the terrace, to see if anyone is coming up the hill. I feelthat I'm in a movie. How pathetic! "Here come the badguys..."

Yet the hill is so calmtonight, a summer night now.

Adventurous, dubious,and demented were the events I reconstructed to pass the time, andto keep up my spirits, as I stood waiting in the periscope twonights ago, between five and ten o'clock, moving my legs as if tosome Afro-Brazilian beat to help the blood circulate.

I thought back over thelast few years, abandoning myself to the magic rolling of theatabaques, accepting the revelation that our fantasies, begun as amechanical ballet, were about to be transformed, in this temple ofthings mechanical, into rite, possession, apparition, and thedominion of Exu.

In the periscope I hadno proof that what I had learned from the printout was true. Icould still take refuge in doubt. At midnight, perhaps, I woulddiscover that I had come to Paris and hidden myself like a thief ina harmless museum of technology only because I had foolishly falleninto a macumba staged for credulous tourists, letting myself behypnotized by the perfu-madores and the rhythm of thepontos.

As I recomposed themosaic, my mood changed from disenchantment to pity tosuspicion¡Xand I wish that now I could rid myself of this presentlucidity and recover that same vacillation between mystic illusionand the presentiment of a trap; recover what I thought then as Imulled over the documents I had read so frantically the day beforeand reread that morning at the airport and during the flight toParis.

How irresponsibly Belbo,Diotallevi, and I had rewritten the world, or¡Xas Diotallevi wouldhave put it¡Xhad rediscovered what in the Book had been engraved atwhite heat between the black lines formed by the letters, likeblack insects, that supposedly made the Torah clear!

And now, two days later,having achieved, I hope, serenity and amor fati, I can tell thestory I reconstructed so anxiously (hoping it was false) inside theperiscope, the story I had read two days ago in Belbo's apartment,the story I had lived for twelve years between Pilade's whiskey andthe dust of Garamond Press.

BINAH

7

Do not expect too muchof the end of the world.

¡XStanislaw J. Lee,Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Krakow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, "Myslinieuczesane"

To enter a university ayear or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Academic deSaint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong. JacopoBelbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convincedme that every generation feels this way. You are always born underthe wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have torewrite your own horoscope day by day.

I believe that what webecome depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, whenthey aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps ofwisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weeklymagazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the greatclassics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, butbecause he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. "Thepurpose of this magazine," I pontificated, quoting the ad, "is toeducate the reader in an entertaining way." "The purpose of yourmagazine," my father replied without looking up from his paper, "isthe purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as itcan."

That day, I began to beincredulous.

Or, rather, I regrettedhaving been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to beborne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

Not that the incredulousperson doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn'tbelieve in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. Hebelieves a second thing only if it somehow follows from the firstthing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. Iftwo things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking thatsomewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them,that's credulity.

Incredulity doesn't killcuriosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chainsof ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don'tbelieve in them, the collision of two ideas¡X both false¡Xcancreate a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had norespect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on,but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make anice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all thebetter.

"You live on thesurface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound,but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together tocreate the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity wouldcollapse if you tried to stand it up."

"Are you saying I'msuperficial?"

"No," she answered."What others call profundity is only a tesseract, afour-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and come out another,and you're in their universe, which can't coexist withyours."

(Lia, now that They havewalked into the cube and invaded our world, I don't know if I'llever see you again. And it was all my fault: I made Them believethere was a depth, a depth that They, in their weakness,desired.)

What did I really thinkfifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of allthose believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in theright, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take anaspirin: It can't hurt, and you might get better.

So there I was, in themidst of the Revolution, or at least in the most stupendousimitation