The Name Of The Rose

by Umberto Eco

This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are.

You see, it’s as if, over the last two centuries, and even earlier, this world of ours had been struck by storms of intolerance, hope, and despair, all together…. No, that’s not a good analogy. Imagine a river, wide and majestic, which flows for miles and miles between strong embankments, where the land is firm. At a certain point, the river, out of weariness, because its flow has taken up too much time and too much space, because it is approaching the sea, which annihilates all rivers in itself, no longer knows what it is, loses its identity. It becomes its own delta.

“But how does it happen,” I said with admiration, “that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?” “Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.” “So one can know things by looking at them from the outside!”

“And you,” I said with childish impertinence, “never commit errors?” “Often,” he answered. “But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.”