Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

Now they form a horrible garland of simulacra that lie in adoration of the Pendulum; it is as if the progeny of Reason and the Enlightenment had been condemned to stand guard forever over the ultimate symbol of Tradition and Wisdom.

But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

“You live on the surface,” Lia told me years later. “You sometimes seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up.” “Are you saying I’m superficial?” “No,” she answered. “What others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and come out another, and you’re in their universe, which can’t coexist with yours.”

As long as you remain in your private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One. But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil.

“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.” “My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But

Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance.

His sterility was infinite. It was part of the ecstasy. —E. M. Cioran, Le mauvais demiurge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, “Pensées étranglées”

And then I encounter you, my love, with those wrinkles around your eyes, your face still beautiful though worn by memory and tender remorse. I almost pass you on the sidewalk, I’m only a few feet away, and you look at me as you look at all people, as though seeking another beyond their shadow. I could speak, erase the years. But to what end? Am I not, even now, fulfilled? I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.

How can life be so bountiful, providing such sublime rewards for mediocrity?

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Does it make sense to choose the wrong Opportunity just to convince yourself that you would have chosen the right one—had you had the Opportunity? I wonder how many of those who opt for fighting today do it for that reason. But a contrived Opportunity is not the right Opportunity. Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards.

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.

he honored me with his friendship, and executed me with the truth. and executed me, revealing to me what I desired revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared. Begin the story in a bar. The need to fall in love. Some things you can feel coming. You don’t fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet.