The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

“Ut cachinnis dissolvatur, torqueatur rictibus!”

Lacrimosa dies illa qua resurget ex favilla iudicandus homo reus: huic ergo parce deus! Pie Iesu domine dona eis requiem.

I. ar. de dictis cuiusdam stulti II. syr. libellus alchemicus aegypt. III. Expositio Magistri Alcofribae de coena beati Cypriani Cartaginensis Episcopi IV. Liber acephalus de stupris virginum et meretricum amoribus

Liber acephalus

Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen. . . .

He had to successfully throw off the ladder so that he could climb up.

Non in commotione, non in commotione Dominus.”

res nullius

Along one stretch of wall I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire I cannot say how; it was rotted by water and consumed by insects. In it there were still a few pages. Other remnants I found by rummaging in the ruins below. Mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if from those disiecta membra of the library a message might reach me. Some fragments of parchment had faded, others permitted the glimpse of an image’s shadow, or the ghost of one or more words. At times I found pages where whole sentences were legible; more often, intact bindings, protected by what had once been metal studs. . . . Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within; yet sometimes a half page had been saved, an incipit was discernible, a title. I collected every relic I could find, filling two traveling sacks with them, abandoning things useful to me in order to save that miserable hoard. Along the return journey and afterward at Melk, I spent many, many hours trying to decipher those remains. Often from a word or a surviving image I could recognize what the work had been. When I found, in time, other copies of those books, I studied them with love, as if destiny had left me this bequest, as if having identified the destroyed copy were a clear sign from heaven that said to me: Tolle et lege.

At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.

Est ubi gloria nunc Babyloniae?

O quam salubre, quam iucundum et suave est sedere in solitudine et tacere et loqui cum Deo!

Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier. . . .

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

ubi sunt

collage movie by Baruchello and Grifi called Verifica incerta,