The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

As for the period in which the events described take place, we are at the end of November 1327; the date of the author’s writing, on the other hand, is uncertain.

The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance.

he sometimes stopped at the edge of a meadow, at the entrance to a forest, to gather some herb (always the same one, I believe): and he would then chew it with an absorbed look. He kept some of it with him, and ate it in the moments of greatest tension (and we had a number of them at the abbey!). Once, when I asked him what it was, he said laughing that a good Christian can sometimes learn also from the infidels, and when I asked him to let me taste it, he replied that herbs that are good for an old Franciscan are not good for a young Benedictine.

At other times he would pass an entire day in the great hall of the library, leafing through manuscripts as if seeking nothing but his own enjoyment (while, around us, the corpses of monks, horribly murdered, were multiplying).

“Roger Bacon, whom I venerate as my master, teaches that the divine plan will one day encompass the science of machines, which is natural and healthy magic. And one day it will be possible, by exploiting the power of nature, to create instruments of navigation by which ships will proceed unico homine regente, and far more rapid than those propelled by sails or oars; and there will be wagons that move without animals to pull them, and flying vehicles guided by a man who will flap their wings as if they were those of a bird. And tiny contraptions that lift infinite weights, and small boats that float on the bottom of the sea.”

His explanation, moreover, seemed to me at that point so obvious that my humiliation at not having discovered it by myself was surpassed only by my pride at now being a sharer in it, and I was almost congratulating myself on my insight.

Baths restore the balance of the humors. Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey.”

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.

They used as many verses as there are letters in the alphabet! Of course, that’s it! The text of the verse doesn’t count, it’s the initial letters that count. Each room is marked by a letter of the alphabet, and all together they make up some text that we must discover!”

At every moment I feared I would find myself before another mirror, because the magic of mirrors is such that even when you know they are mirrors they still upset you.

But perhaps it is my present old age, which makes me feel, culpably, how beautiful and good all my youth was.

In your defense there is the fact that you found yourself in one of those situations in which even a father in the desert would have damned himself. And of woman as source of temptation the Scriptures have already said enough. Ecclesiastes says of woman that her conversation is like burning fire, and the Proverbs say that she takes possession of man’s precious soul and the strongest men are ruined by her. And Ecclesiastes further says: ‘And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands.’ And others have said she is the vessel of the Devil.

Typical

We looked in the first tubs, which were empty. Only the last, concealed by a drawn curtain, was full, and next to it lay a garment, in a heap. At first sight, in the beam of our lamp, the surface of the liquid seemed smooth; but as the light struck it we glimpsed on the bottom, lifeless, a naked human body. We pulled it out slowly: Berengar.

But you see already that in both cases our abbot is concerned for the good name of his monastery. Murderer or next victim as he may be, he does not want defamatory news about this holy community to travel beyond these mountains. Kill his monks, but do not touch the honor of his abbey. Ah, by

I want to see the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps the only copy.”

Adelmo, showed he was less secretive than you had hoped. So you came and set your trap. Just in time, because a few nights later Venantius got in, stole the book, and avidly leafed through it, with an almost physical voracity. He soon felt ill and ran to seek help in the kitchen. Where he died. Am I mistaken?”

The pages were poisoned

“I have killed no one. Each died according to his destiny because of his sins. I was only an instrument.” “Yesterday you said that Judas also was an instrument. That does not prevent him from being damned.”

“Your anathemas against laughter would surely not have been enough for me, or what little I learned about your argument with the others. At first I didn’t understand their significance. But there were references to a shameless stone that rolls over the plain, and to cicadas that will sing from the ground, to venerable fig trees. I had already read something of the sort: I verified it during these past few days. These are examples that Aristotle used in the first book of the Poetics,

Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?”

Why did this one fill you with such fear?” “Because it was by the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries. The fathers had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism. The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter,

Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for canceling fear.

Jorge, who sensed the movement, feeling the vibration of the air, drew back, clasping the volume to his chest with his left hand while his right went on tearing the pages and cramming them into his mouth.

his right hand let go of the volume, darted toward the lamp, and abruptly tore it from me, flinging it away. . . . The lamp fell right on the pile of books that had been knocked from the table all in a heap, lying open. The oil spilled out, the fire immediately seized a fragile parchment, which blazed up like a bundle of dry twigs.

“It is impossible, we will never do it, not even with all the monks of the abbey. The library is lost.” Unlike the angel, William wept.

The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.” “But in imagining an erroneous order you still found

It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb aches. I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about:

I didn’t know what most of it was about either. Too much bloat.

(the great of yesteryear, the once-famous cities, the lovely princesses: everything disappears into the void),