Derek’s Comments (group member since Sep 16, 2013)

Derek’s comments from the Foucault's Pendulum group.

EdMohs wrote: "It keeps coming around"

<groan />

EdMohs wrote: "the thesis is longing"

More <groan /> Don't quit your day job!

Kellyjosephc wrote: "I believe the time in Brazil is also a nod to a literal pendulum."

Beautiful!

Yes, I heard about Eco. I've only read this and The Name of the Rose, but I'll still miss him.

Ed wrote: "it seems that Eco’s set up the 3 characters as well learned and not subject to NOT being easily fooled "

Oh, no! Any con man will tell you that those are the easiest types to con!

Ed wrote: "I'm sure its Ecoian But who is the quote attributed to ? a hunt !"

It is from Foucault's Pendulum: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes...

It's narrative, not dialogue, so it must be Casaubon.

He might at least have signed it!

Ed wrote: "But in that part of the discussion about Chartres they weren’t talking about the ‘ROCK’."

Certainly not. I was thinking it's more along the lines of "if these walls could talk..."

Yes, I think the publisher had his own agenda, slightly beyond just taking poor authors to the cleaners.

I'm afraid that I missed Vasilis' question at the time.

The colonel's talking about "reading" Chartres Cathedral, and I'm fairly certain that "that rock" is merely the stones of the cathedral itself. Which doesn't help explain who Erik is, and Avalon afaik is purely legendary. What Chartres would know of Avalon is beyond me.

Traveller wrote: "Of course, copying the famous phrase, Gandalf also said it in the film version of Lord of the Rings, ha ha."

No, no! Gandalf said it first! Tolkien said The Lord of the Rings was history :-)

No, really, we're used to this :-)

Ed wrote: "Was Casaubon set up? "

Hah! You expect simple answers to questions like that? I think the answer is "Yes", "No", and "Why? Do you know something?" depending on time of day, season, and the direction of a flight of birds. I certainly doubt Eco would ever tell!

Ed wrote: "As an experiment I replaced the word 'God' in the text of Thessalonian with 'the Plan'.

The reading started sounding like something Aglie would pontificate on from Belbo's perspective. "

LOL! That's part of the whole problem, though. If you look for conspiracies, you'll always find them. Plugging "The Plan" into any book of the Bible would likely make a kind of sense, especially since the meaning of biblical books tends to be a tad obscure in the first place. Replacing "One Ring" with "Plan" in Lord of the Rings might sound equally mysterious.

You're never too late to the discussion. Most, if not all, of the participants in this discussion are still active on Goodreads.

Tell us more about 'consciousnesses as conspiracy'!

Well it's pretty much the definition of "extreme right" (by the not-so-right) that they are the people who always believe the barbarians are at the gates. In the particular context of the times in Italy, well, yes, the barbarians really are at the gates as everything seems to be for sale, especially justice.

"Barbarians at the gates" is a common metaphor in English, for anything that threatens culture or an established way of life. But in this case, I had assumed the colonel meant the threat to his own investigation.

"Dichotomy"—yeah, that was the word I was looking for :-) I have a huge vocabulary, and often no way to drag those words off either the tip of my tongue or my fingers...

I wonder, also, if the modern usage of "cynic" in English even applies in Italian? But I think it must.

Traveller wrote: "The Enlightenment, of course, was cynical in the sense that it rejected religion and superstition and promoted rationalism. Belbo represents, therefore, Enlightenment rationalism (and cynicism). "

Right on. There's also the disjunction between Cynicism (the philosophical school) and the modern meaning of cynicism. I'm not sure that the Enlightenment was particularly motivated by either: rationalism isn't cynicism, and rejecting religion and superstition doesn't come close to any dictionary meaning of cynicism that I can find (e.g., "belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest" and "contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motive"). A pole-sitter may well be a Cynic: it seems extreme, but Cynicism and asceticism certainly have similarities.

Diotallevi has to be referring to Belbo with the "cynicism of the Enlightenment" comment, because Simeon (and Macarius, whichever one he meant) is more than a millenium before the Enlightenment). So he's calling Belbo a cynic—but of course he's one of the founders of The Plan, which is far more cynical than either Simeon (as Belbo ascribes his motives) or anything Belbo has done to this point.

It occurs to me that probably the only books I've ever read completely in multiple translations are books of the bible... Which can certainly take quite different meanings depending on the translation.

Marina wrote: "As for the choice of the Epistle to the Thessalonians, I wonder if Eco just randomly chose a long rambling epistle (not necessarily the longest) just to contrast with the short telegraphic "Fiat Lux"? "

It's longer than many, but shorter, counting both Epistles (at least in number of chapters-I didn't count pages or words) than Romans, Corinthians or Hebrews.

I wonder if it's just that the title "Thessalonians" is the longest of any epistle?

Vasilis wrote: "Hello! I am very happy to join to your group.
I am Greek and i read Foucault's Pendulum in a greek edition, but the translation isn't very good. So, many times, when i can't understand the meaning,..."

It's handy to have a few languages for this sort of thing!

http://courses.logos.it/plscourses/li...

Deals with this passage and its translation directly, but I confess it doesn't mean a lot to me.

But the summary seems to be that while it wasn't a literal translation, Eco seems to like it better than the original.