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

himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias,painless aphasias.

Where were you lastnight, L

There, indiscreetreader: you will never know it, but that half-line hanging in spacewas actually the beginning of a long sentence that I wrote but thenwished I hadn't, wished I hadn't even thought let alone written it,wished that it had never happened. So I pressed a key, and a milkyfilm spread over the fatal and inopportune lines, and I pressedDELETE and, whoosh, all gone.

But that's not all. Theproblem with suicide is that sometimes you jump out the window andthen change your mind between the eighth floor and the seventh."Oh, if only I could go back!" Sorry, you can't, too bad. Splat.Abu, on the other hand, is merciful, he grants you the right tochange your mind: you can recover your deleted text by pressingRETRIEVE. What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever Ilike, I forget.

Never again will I gofrom one bar to another, disintegrating alien spacecraft withtracer bullets, until the invader monster disintegrates me. This isfar more beautiful: here you disintegrate thoughts instead ofaliens. The screen is a galaxy of thousands and thousands ofasteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created themyourself. Fiat Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, sevenseconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe inconstant flux, where sharp lines in space and time do not exist. Nonumerus Clausius here, no constraining law of thermodynamics. Theletters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge fromnothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving likeectoplasm. It's an underwater symphony of soft linkings andunlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like thebig fish in the Yellow Submarine. At a touch of your fingertip theirreparable slides backward toward a hungry word and disappearsinto its maw with a slump, then darkness. If you don't stop, theword swallows itself as well, fattening on its own absence like aCheshire-cat black hole.

And if you happen towrite what modesty forbids, it all goes onto a floppy disk, and youcan give the disk a password, and no one will be able to read you.Excellent for secret agents. You write the message, save it, thenput the disk in your pocket and walk off. Not even Tor-quemadacould find out what you've written: It's between you and it (It?).And if they torture you, you pretend to confess; you start enteringthe password, then press a secret key, and the message disappearsforever. Oh, I'm so sorry, you say, my hand slipped, an accident,and now it's gone. What was it? I don't remember. It wasn'timportant. I have no Message to reveal. But later on¡Xwho knows?¡XImight.

4

He who attempts topenetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the keyresembles a man who would walk without feet.

¡XMichael Maier,Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim, De Bry, 1618, emblem XXVII

That was the only filethat had been printed out. I would have to go through the disks onthe computer. They were arranged by number, and I thought I mightas well start with the first. But Belbo had mentioned a password.He had always been possessive with Abulafia's secrets.

When I loaded themachine, a message promptly appeared: "Do you have the password?"Not in the imperative. Belbo was a polite man.

The machine doesn'tvolunteer its help. It must be given the word; without the word, itwon't talk. As though it were saying: "Yes, what you want to knowis right here hi my guts. Go ahead and dig, dig, old mole; you'llnever find it." We'll see about that, I said to myself; you gotsuch a kick out of playing with Diotallevi's permutations andcombinations, and you were the Sam Spade of publishing. As JacopoBelbo would have said: Find the falcon.

* * *

The password to get intoAbulafia had to be seven letters or fewer. Letters or numbers. Howmany groups of seven could be made from all the letters of thealphabet, including the possibility of repetition, since there wasno reason the word couldn't be "cadabra"? I knew the formula. Thenumber was six billion and something. A giant calculator capable ofrunning through all six billion at the rate of a million per secondwould still have to feed them to Abulafia one at a time. And ittook Abulafia about ten seconds to ask for the password and verifyit. That made sixty billion seconds. There were over thirty-onemillion seconds in a year. Say thirty, to have a round figure. Itwould take, therefore, two thousand years to go through all thepossibilities. Nice work.

I would have to proceed,instead, by inductive guesswork. What word would Belbo have chosen?Was it a word he had decided on at the start, when he began usingthe machine, or was it one he had come up with only recently, whenhe realized that these disks were dangerous and that, for him atleast, the game was no longer a game? This would make a bigdifference.

Better assume thelatter, I thought. Belbo feels he is being hunted by the Plan,which he now takes seriously (as he told me on the phone). For apassword, then, he would use some term connected with ourstory.

But maybe not: a termassociated with the Tradition might also occur to Them. Then Ithought: What if They had already broken into the apartment andmade copies of the disks, and were now, at this very moment, tryingall the combinations of letters in some remote place? Using thesupreme computer, in a castle in the Carpathians.

Nonsense, I told myself.They weren't computer people. They would use the notarikon, thegematria, the temurah, treating the disks like the Torah, andtherefore would require as much time as had passed since thewriting of the Sefer Yesirah. No, if They existed, They wouldproceed cabalistically, and if Belbo believed that They existed, hewould follow the same path.

Just to be on the safeside, I tried the ten Sefirot: Keter, Hokh-mah, Binah, Hesed,Gevurah, Tiferet, Nezah, Hod, Yesod, Malkhut. They didn't work, ofcourse: it was the first thing that would have occurred toanyone.

Still, the word had tobe something obvious, something that would come to mind at once,because when you work on a text as obsessively as Belbo must haveduring the past few days, you can't think of anything else, of