We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die

*European literary intellectuals, man, there's nothing like 'em.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,00.html

SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world's great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world's most important museums. The subjects of your exhibition sound a little commonplace, though: the essential nature of lists, poets who list things in their works and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. Why...