The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

in those days they were brewing beer, and it was prepared with the method of my country, with heather, swamp myrtle, and wild rosemary. All spices that intoxicated, more than my nostrils, my mind.

truth is indivisible, it shines with its own transparency and does not allow itself to be diminished by our interests or our shame.

well, dear Adso, it is not a thing to be wished before it happens, but it is not something to vituperate too much once it has happened.

a man who so thirsted for new and vital experiences.

The body, white and flabby, without hair, seemed a woman’s except for the obscene spectacle of the flaccid pudenda. I blushed, then shuddered. I made the sign of the cross as William blessed the corpse.

In fact, here we have a trace also on the third finger. At the time I thought that Venantius had handled some inks in the scriptorium. . . .”

A poisoned book

“I deduce nothing: according to the rules of syllogism nihil sequitur geminis ex particularibus unquam, no law can be drawn from two single facts. First of all we have to know the law; for example, that a substance exists that blackens the fingers of those who touch it. . . .” Triumphantly, I completed the syllogism: “. . . Venantius and Berengar have blackened fingers, ergo they touched this substance!” “Good, Adso,” William said, “what a pity that not even your syllogism is valid, because aut semel aut iterum medium generaliter esto, and in this syllogism the middle term never appears as general.

Aristotelean logic

I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon, and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed. Further, since I had been with my master I had become aware, and was to become even more aware in the days that followed, that logic could be especially useful when you entered it but then left it.

Great note for the trump era

We have a daytime abbey and a nighttime abbey, and the nighttime one seems, unhappily, the more interesting.

The two men had met on Bald Mountain, both in Dolcino’s band; Salvatore and the cellarer had fled together and had entered the convent of Casale, and, still together, they had joined the Cluniacs.

“I didn’t say that, but you’ll agree that there is a hierarchy of depravity as there is of virtue. . . . The flesh can be tempted according to nature and . . . against nature.” “You’re telling me that Berengar was impelled by carnal desires for those of his own sex?”

What is the purpose of the holy cleansing of confession, if not to unload the weight of sin, and the remorse it involves, into the very bosom of our Lord, obtaining with absolution a new and airy lightness of soul, such as to make us forget the body tormented by wickedness?

Self serving; the stain of sexual coercion is not erased cause god doesnt exisst (according to thr novell )

sometimes breaking into a run so that I might attribute to the motion of my body the sudden pounding of my heart,

My intellect knew her as an occasion of sin, my sensitive appetite perceived her as the vessel of every grace.

It was as if all creation spoke to me of her, and I desired to see her again, true, but I was also prepared to accept the idea of never seeing her again, and of never lying again with her, provided that I could savor the joy that filled me that morning, and have her always near even if she were to be, and for eternity, distant.

just as the whole universe is surely like a book written by the finger of God, in which everything speaks to us of the immense goodness of its Creator, in which every creature is description and mirror of life and death, in which the humblest rose becomes a gloss of our terrestrial progress—everything, in other words, spoke to me only of the face I had hardly glimpsed in the aromatic shadows of the kitchen.

Title titular

my fault lay in trying to reconcile natural appetite and the dictates of the rational soul.

I was suffering from the conflict between the elicit appetite of the intellect, in which the will’s rule should have been displayed, and the elicit appetite of the senses, subject to human passions.

and I wished her to be saved from the cruel necessity that drove her to barter herself for a bit of food, and I wished her to be happy; nor did I want to ask anything further of her, but only to think of her and see her in sheep, oxen, trees, in the serene light that bathed in happiness the grounds of the abbey.

Boo

Now I know that good is cause of love and that which is good is defined by knowledge, and you can only love what you have learned is good, whereas I had, indeed, learned that the girl was the good of the irascible appetite, but the evil of the will.

succumbing to the terrestrial passion of recollection, a foolish attempt to elude the flow of time, and death.

And the flocks were watched by dogs, called “canes” from the verb “canor” because of their barking. The perfect animal among animals, with superior gifts of perception, the dog recognizes its master and is trained to hunt wild animals in the forests, to guard flocks against wolves; it protects the master’s house and his children, and sometimes in its office of defense it is killed. King Garamant, who had been taken away to prison by his enemies, was brought back to his homeland by a pack of two hundred dogs who made their way past the enemy troops; the dog of Jason Licius, after its master’s death, persisted in refusing food until it died of starvation; and the dog of King Lysimachus threw himself on his master’s funeral pyre, to die with him. The dog has the power to heal wounds by licking them with his tongue, and the tongue of his puppies can heal intestinal lesions. By nature he is accustomed to making second use of the same food, after vomiting it. His sobriety is the symbol of perfection of spirit, as the thaumaturgical power of his tongue is the symbol of the purification of sins through confession and penance. But the dog’s returning to his vomit is also a sign that, after confession, we return to the same sins as before, and this moral was very useful to me that morning to admonish my heart,

I thought of these things, again at peace with the world and with myself, observing the merry toil of that morning hour.

I must think it over. Perhaps I’ll have to read other books.” “Why? To know what one book says you must read others?” “At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem. In reading Albert, couldn’t I learn what Thomas might have said? Or in reading Thomas, know what Averroës said?”

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me.

centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death...

“And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Not always and not necessarily. In this case it is.”

“der Teufel,” the Devil, and he blessed himself devoutly, looking at me in amazement. Then the misunderstanding was cleared up and we both laughed at it. Such is the magic of human languages, that by human accord often the same sounds mean different things.

capable of great outbursts of laughter, fervid tensions, eloquent silences, deft in turning his gaze away from his interlocutor if the latter’s question required him to conceal, with what seemed absent-mindedness, his refusal to reply.

I was struck by his gray eyes, capable of staring without any expression; I was to see them often flash with ambiguous light, shrewd both in concealing thoughts and passions and in deliberately conveying them.

we left him to his calm, embittered delirium.

Confident Southerner

But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit.

Rules for writing mysteries

Hoc spumans mundanas obvallat Pelagus oras terrestres amniosis fluctibus cudit margines. Saxeas undosis molibus irruit avionias. Infima bomboso vertice miscet glareas asprifero spergit spumas sulco, sonoreis frequenter quatitur flabris.

“More or less. Vikings from the Far North came down along the rivers to sack Rome. The pagan temples were falling in ruins, and the Christian ones did not yet exist. It was only the monks of Hibernia in their monasteries who wrote and read, read and wrote, and illuminated, and then jumped into little boats made of animal hide and navigated toward these lands and evangelized them as if you people were infidels, you understand?

They corrected the errors of nature.”

Hmm

“The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book . . .” “A book containing a wisdom different from ours. But you understand why they put it here, where the lions, the monsters, are. This is why we saw that book on the monstrous animals, where you also found the unicorn. This area called LEONES contains the books that the creators of the library considered books of falsehood.

auctoritas,

Latin for authority

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.

“Then higher truths can be expressed while the letter is lying,”

“By the seven churches of Clonmacnois!

Love it

terraqueous orb.

defines love as a rebel illness whose treatment lies within itself, for the sick person does not want to be healed and he who is ill with it is reluctant to get well (and God knows this was true!).

Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Zakariyya ar-Razi, who in a Liber continens identifies amorous melancholy with lycanthropy,

Werewolfishness

the animal turned it displayed the evil of its behind, more fetid than any other, as is proper for that anus which many devotees of Satan, not least the Knights Templar, have always been accustomed to kiss in the course of their meetings. And after moving about the women for an hour, the cat sprang on the bell rope and climbed up it, leaving his stinking waste behind. And is not the cat the animal beloved by the Catharists, who according to Alanus de Insulis are so called from ‘catus,’ because of this beast whose posterior they kiss, considering it the incarnation of Lucifer?

Rabeliasian; Bakhtinian

the life of our lord Pope himself, poisoning his foods. The Pope was able to defend himself and identify the toxin only because he was supplied with prodigious jewels in the form of serpents’ tongues, fortified by wondrous emeralds and rubies that through divine power were able to reveal the presence of poison in the foods.

Oh brother

For all her shouting, she was as if mute.

There are words that give power, others that make us all the more derelict, and to this latter category belong the vulgar words of the simple, to whom the Lord has not granted the boon of self-expression in the universal tongue of knowledge and power.

Powerlesness of language /class

if you look at her and feel desire, that alone makes her a witch.

the lynx of Boeotia,

If you think of what is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, and in the belly, you will find only filth. And if it revolts you to touch mucus or dung with your fingertip, how could we desire to embrace the sack that contains that dung?”

Bakhtin/anti rabelais