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

of it, seeking an honorable faith. It was honorable, forexample, to take part in rallies and marches. I chanted "Fascistscum, your time has come!" with everybody else. I never threwpaving stones or ball bearings, out of fear that others might dounto me as I did unto them, but I experienced a kind of moralexcitement escaping along narrow downtown streets when the policecharged. I would come home with the sense of having performed aduty. In the meetings I remained untouched by the disagreementsthat divided the various groups: I always had the feeling that ifyou substituted the right phrase for another phrase, you could movefrom group to group. I amused myself by finding the right phrases.I modulated.

At the demonstrations, Iwould fall in behind one banner or another, drawn by a girl who hadaroused my interest, so I came to the conclusion that for many ofmy companions political activism was a sexual thing. But sex was apassion. I wanted only curiosity. True, in the course of my readingabout the Templars and the various atrocities attributed to them, Ihad come across Carpocrates's assertion that to escape the tyrannyof the angels, the masters of the cosmos, every possible ignominyshould be perpetrated, that you should discharge all debts to theworld and to your own body, for only by committing every act canthe soul be freed of its passions and return to its originalpurity. When we were inventing the Plan, I found that many addictsof the occult pursued that path in their search for enlightenment.According to his biographers, Aleister Crowley, who has been calledthe most perverted man of all time and who did everything thatcould be done with his worshipers, both men and women, chose onlythe ugliest partners of either sex. I have the nagging suspicion,however, that his lovemaking was incomplete.

There must be aconnection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. Iliked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily.You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. Onthe other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors ofthe university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'dend up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.I was almost clubbed. A tall guy with a Tartar mustache said I wasa fascist. I'll never forget him. He later shaved his head and nowbelongs to a commune where they weave baskets.

I evoke the mood ofthose days only to reconstruct my state of mind when I began tovisit Garamond Press and made friends with Jacopo Belbo. I was thetype who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a viewtoward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that Iam," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was whereto put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

That's why I wiselychose philology. The University of Milan was the place to be inthose years. Everywhere else in the country students were takingover classrooms and telling the professors they should teach onlyproletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a fewincidents, a constitutional pact¡Xor, rather, a territorialcompromise¡Xheld. The Revolution occupied the grounds, theauditorium, and the main halls, while traditional Culture,protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, whereit went on talking as if nothing had happened.

The result was that Icould spend the morning debating proletarian matters downstairs andthe afternoon pursuing aristocratic knowledge upstairs. In thesetwo parallel universes I lived comfortably and felt nocontradiction. I firmly believed that an egalitarian society wasdawning, but I also thought that the trains, for example, in thisbetter society ought to run better, and the militants around mewere not learning how to shovel coal into the furnace, work theswitches, or draw up timetables. Somebody had to be ready tooperate the trains.

I felt like a kind ofStalin laughing to himself, somewhat remorsefully, and thinking:"Go ahead, you poor Bolsheviks. I'm going to study in this seminaryin Tiflis, and we'll see which one of us gets to draft theFive-Year Plan."

Perhaps because I wasalways surrounded by enthusiasm in the morning, in the afternoon Icame to equate learning with distrust. I wanted to study somethingthat confined itself to what could be documented, as opposed towhat was merely a matter of opinion.

For no particular reasonI signed up for a seminar on medieval history and chose, for mythesis subject, the trial of the Templars. It was a story thatfascinated me from the moment I first glanced at the documents. Atthat time, when we were struggling against those in power, I waswholeheartedly outraged by the trial in which the Templars, throughevidence it would be generous to call circumstantial, weresentenced to the stake. Then I quickly learned that, for centuriesafter their execution, countless lovers of the occult persisted inlooking for them, seeking everywhere, without ever producing proofof their existence. This visionary excess offended my incredulity,and I resolved to waste no more time on these hunters of secrets. Iwould stick to primary sources. The Templars were monastic knights;their order was recognized by the Church. If the Church dissolvedthat order, as in fact it had seven centuries ago, then theTemplars could no longer exist. Therefore, if they existed, theyweren't Templars. I drew up a bibliography of more than a hundredbooks, but in the end read only about thirty of them.

It was through theTemplars that I first got to know Jacopo Belbo¡Xat Pilade's towardthe end of ¡¥72, when I was at work on my thesis.

8

Having come from thelight and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated fromthem.

¡XFragment of TUrfa'nM7

In those days Pilade'sBar was a free port, a galactic tavern where alien invaders fromOphiulco could rub elbows peaceably with the soldiers of the Empirepatrolling the Van Alien belt. It was an old bar near one of thenavigli, the Milan canals, ^with a zinc counter and a billiardtable. Local tram drivers and artisans would drop in first thing inthe morning for a glass of white wine. In ¡¥68 and in the yearsthat followed, Pilade's became a kind of Rick's Cafe, whereMovement activists could play cards with a reporter from thebosses' newspaper