More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The scholarly discovery (I mean mine, the third in chronological order) entertained me while I was in Prague, waiting for a dear friend. Six days later Soviet troops invaded that unhappy city. I managed, not without adventure, to reach the Austrian border at Linz, and from there I journeyed to Vienna, where I met my beloved, and together we sailed up the Danube.
analecta
As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
But Temesvar’s pages were before my eyes, and the episodes he cited were the same as those of the Vallet manuscript (the description of the labyrinth in particular left no room for doubt).
the end of November 1327;
the last or next-to-last decade of the fourteenth century.
Adso thinks and writes like a monk who has remained impervious to the revolution of the vernacular,
Finally, was I to retain in Latin the passages that Abbé Vallet himself did not feel it opportune to translate, perhaps to preserve the ambience of the period?
it is an act of love. Or, if you like, a way of ridding myself of numerous, persistent obsessions.
(now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated),
“In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.”
prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events that I happened to observe in my youth, now repeating all that I saw and heard, without venturing to seek a design,
Boethius says, nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn;
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. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels. Everything is diverted from its proper course. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path
...more
And he answered that the beauty of the cosmos derives not only from unity in variety, but also from variety in unity.
learned subsequently that the men of his land often define things in ways in which it seems that the enlightening power of reason has scant function.
“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
...more
And praised be our Creator who, as the Scriptures say, has decreed all things in number, weight, and measure.
The abbot was bewildered for a moment. “Why,” he asked, “do you insist on speaking of criminal acts without referring to their diabolical cause?” “Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky. “Let us suppose
I know your abbey is the only light that Christianity can oppose to the thirty-six libraries of Baghdad, to the ten thousand codices of the Vizir Ibn al-Alkami, that the number of your Bibles equals the two thousand four hundred Korans that are the pride of Cairo, and that the reality of your cases is luminous evidence against the proud legend of the infidels who years ago claimed (intimates as they are of the Prince of Falsehood) the library of Tripoli was rich in six million volumes and inhabited by eighty thousand commentators and two hundred scribes.”
Dacians,
Because of mankind’s sins the world is teetering on the brink of the abyss, permeated by the very abyss that the abyss invokes.
Abyss looks back ; neiszche
When our eyes had finally grown accustomed to the gloom, the silent speech of the carved stone, accessible as it immediately was to the gaze and the imagination of anyone (for images are the literature of the layman), dazzled my eyes and plunged me into a vision that even today my tongue can hardly describe.
purple imperial tunic
I saw an emerald rainbow glittering. Before the throne, beneath the feet of the Seated One, a sea of crystal flowed, and around the Seated One, beside and above the throne, I saw four awful creatures—awful for me, as I looked at them, transported, but docile and dear for the Seated One, whose praises they sang without cease.
united in their variety and varied in their unity,
the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes and to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and
...more
Hell
U knkw thoae evil mofuckh's are there!
Guitar solo!
for man cannot call the dog once dog and once cat, or utter sounds to which a consensus of people has not assigned a definite meaning, as would happen if someone said the word “blitiri.”
I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say,
Someone had told me that the greatest poet of those days, Dante Alighieri of Florence, dead only a few years, had composed a poem (which I could not read, since it was written in vulgar Tuscan) of which many verses were nothing but a paraphrase of passages written by Ubertino in his Arbor vitae crucifixae.
Invented History of dante?
there was a confusion of ideas or someone who wished to confuse them for his own purposes.
condemning the Fraticelli the Pope condemned the whole order. It would seem strange that a pope should consider perverse the idea that Christ was poor, but advocating the poverty of Christ was clearly a very short step from advocating the poverty of his church, and a poor church would have become weak in comparison to the Emperor.
William of Occam.” “I knew him only slightly. I don’t like him. A man without fervor, all head, no heart.”
“They were Minorites whose minds were aflame with the same visions as Clare’s, and often the step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is very brief,” William said.
the child’s body was torn to pieces and mixed with flour, to make blasphemous hosts!”
I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”
There was something . . . feminine, and therefore diabolical, about that young man who is dead. He had the eyes of a maiden seeking commerce with an incubus. But I said ‘pride’ also, the pride of the intellect, in this monastery consecrated to the pride of the word, to the illusion of wisdom.”
“Nature is good because she is the daughter of God,” Ubertino said. “And God must be good, since He generated nature,” William said with a smile.
she roils in lust like a snake in heat!
At that moment, terrified, I thought Ubertino was in the power of a kind of holy frenzy, and I feared for his reason. Now, with the distance of time, knowing what I know—namely, that two years later he would be mysteriously killed in a German city by a murderer never discovered—I am all the more terrified, because obviously that evening Ubertino was prophesying.
Good.way to justify and add momentum
your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!”
“Your Bacon’s Antichrist was a pretext for cultivating intellectual pride.” “A holy pretext.”
It is only petty men who seem normal.
When I talk with Ubertino I have the impression that hell is heaven seen from the other side.”
Eat garlic instead. Warm and dry, it is good against poisons. Even if they say that eating too many of them at night induces bad dreams. Far less, however, than certain other herbs that even provoke evil visions.”
Jorge of Burgos,
Borges
Outside the pigpens, swineherds were stirring a great jarful of the blood of the freshly slaughtered pigs, to keep it from coagulating. If it was stirred properly and promptly, it would remain liquid for the next few days, thanks to the cold climate, and then they would make blood puddings from it.
Yum…chekhov's blood
