Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving.

“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.” “What do you mean?” “Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses.

“What makes you trust me?” “Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”

“I hope Gudrun didn’t frighten you,” he said. “Gudrun? That . . . signora?” “Signorina. Her name isn’t really Gudrun. We call her that because of her Nibelung look and because her speech is vaguely Teutonic. She wants to say everything quickly, so she saves time by leaving out the vowels. But she has a sense of justitia aequatrix: when she types, she skips consonants.”

Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies.” “Great,” Belbo said admiringly. “I have one, too: Aztec Equitation.” “Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Adynata?” “We’ll have to see,” Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. “Potio-section . . .” He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. “Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,” he said to Diotallevi. “It’s not a department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of Tetrapyloctomy.” “What’s tetra . . . ?” I asked. “The art of splitting a hair four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We’re not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it’s the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn’t seem completely useless.”

“Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school’s aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”

“And how many departments are there?” “Four so far, but that may be enough for the whole syllabus. The Tetrapyloctomy department has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata, or Impossibilia. Like Urban Planning for Gypsies. The essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing’s absurdity. We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrio-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film.” “How about crowd psychology in the Sahara?” “Wonderful,” Belbo said. Diotallevi nodded. “You should join us. The kid’s got talent, eh, Jacopo?”

“Maybe. But what courses did we put under Oxymoronics? Oh, yes, here we are: Tradition in Revolution, Democratic Oligarchy, Parmenidean Dynamics, Heraclitean Statics, Spartan Sybaritics, Tautological Dialectics, Boolean Eristic.”

When I returned from Brazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty. At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and where he lived.

I decided to invent a job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I would be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. I once thought it was necessary to have a theory, and that my problem was that I didn’t. But nowadays all you needed was information; everybody was greedy for information, especially if it was out of date.

A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning. Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I’d sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I’d brought up from the corner store in a paper bag.

I had a strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too: 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.

“Naturally. None of these people left records. The only things we know about them come to us from the gossip of their enemies.

Blissfully because, as the Arab historiographers of the Sunni line and then the Christian chroniclers from Oderic of Pordenone to Marco Polo wrote, the Old Man had discovered a way to make his knights faithful even to the supreme sacrifice, to make them invincible, horrible war machines. He took them as youths, asleep, to the summit of the mountain, where he stupefied them with pleasures—wine, women, flowers, delectable banquets, and hashish—which gave the sect its name. When they could no longer do without the perverse delights of that invented paradise, he dragged them out of their sleep and set before them a choice: Go, kill, and if you succeed, this paradise you leave will again be yours, and forever; but if you fail, you will plunge back into the Gehenna of the everyday.

Belbo thought: You old voyeur, you’re getting aroused; serves you right. With all your Saint-Germain airs, you’re just another petty charlatan living off the shell game, and then you buy the Brooklyn Bridge from the first charlatan who’s a bigger charlatan than you are. Now I’ll send you on a wild-goose chase looking for maps, so you’ll vanish into the bowels of the earth, carried away by the telluric currents, until you crack your head against the transoceanic monolith of some Celtic valve.

So Garamond, too, was part of the secret. What secret? The one that only he, Belbo, could reveal. The one that did not exist.

Perhaps no one intended it, perhaps the sacrifice of Lorenza was to have sufficed, but the acolytes were now pressing inside the magic circle, which was made accessible by the immobility of the Pendulum, and someone—Ardenti, I think—was hurled by the others against the table, which literally disappeared from beneath Belbo’s feet. It skidded away, and, thanks to the same push, the Pendulum began a rapid, violent swing, taking its victim with it. The wire, pulled by the weight of the sphere, tightened around the neck of my poor friend, yanked him into the air, and he swung above and with the Pendulum, swung toward the eastern extremity of the choir, then returned, I hoped without life, in my direction.

So Belbo—God knows for how long—had been thinking of the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary. He hadn’t died as the victim of a Plan of recent manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.

If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model.

The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him.