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You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
This is the Belpo defining what is wrong with someone who is obsessed with eh Templars.
“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.
A delightful sentence where Diotallevi and Belpo are describing the useless 'sciences' they keep track of.
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.
There is a point to them discussing oxymorons. It's a logical extension of the above discussion of useless 'sciences', but there's necessarily an element of conspiracy theorists, the one that Sartre claimed when he said that the meaning of words don't matter to the antisemites. They will accept these backwards 'sciences' without any doubts as if they make perfect sense, even though if you were to look at them sensually then they would make none.
Why don’t you come up to the office? I have paper cups and a free afternoon.” “A zeugma,” I said.
I love zeugmas, both the word and what they are.
The colonel seemed caught in the same heroic ecstasy that had impelled his Obersturmunddrang, or whatever the hell that German was, to the supreme sacrifice. Someone had to bring him down to earth.
He paused, wanting us to hang on his every word. We hung.
A lovely turn of phrase.
The Benedictines are the heirs of the Druids. Everybody knows that.”
Of course.
“You just have to decide which stars to omit,” Belbo said. “Precisely,” the colonel agreed.
A common trend, imbeciles being voluntarily mysterious to appear deep.
I mean, I see here a mustachioed gentleman in his underwear who looks like d’Artagnan, surrounded by abracadabras and capricorns. Who is he? Mandrake?”
As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”
“Yes. Mankind can’t endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.”
It is the fundamental explanation for a lot of the characters' actions in the book, the desire to look outside for simplicity. I think a lot of our political dilemmas, contemporary and Fascism in 1940s Italy can be traced to this.
“I thought you liked saxophones,” Belbo said. Then he turned and kissed her hand. “But, to work,” he said, serious again. “We’re here to create a story of the future, not a remembrance of things past.”
“I will tell you the deeper significance of this, which otherwise might seem a banal hydraulic joke. Caus knew that if one fills a vessel with water and seals it at the top, the water, even if one then opens a hole in the bottom, will not come out. But if one opens a hole at the top also, the water spurts out below.” “Isn’t that obvious?” I said. “Air enters at the top and presses the water down.” “A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second case, but why it refuses to come out in the
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Eco very expertly captured the essence of the confabulator, the way that he purposely confuses causes with effects and invents reasons to make sure that their made up reasons are always on top.
The Paulicians are also accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing children’s blood in their bread and the Eucharistic wine.” “Like everybody else.”
I added this comment because it reminds me of jokes that my dear friend always makes.
“Enough,” I said to him. “I’m tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for yourself.” “I can’t,” he answered with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. “He won’t let me.” “Who? Dee?” “No, Verulam. Don’t you know he’s now the one in charge? He’s forcing me to write works that later he’ll claim as his own.
In this passage that Belpo made up, the protagonist is the phantom writer for William Shakespeare, and William Shakespeare is the phantom writer for Sir Francis Bacon, quite delightful.
. It’s obvious: Bacon inserted those words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in dyes. . . .
The joke is that Agliè who has presented himself as the immortal Saint-Germain and expertly immersed in conspiracy theories, in the histories, went around grifting rich people and pretending to be an expert in dyeing. I highlighted this passage because it's very similar to above in that the Diabolicals must appear mysterious, and they'll do that in the most stupid ways.
“Which de Maistre?” I asked. “Joseph or Xavier?” “Joseph.” “The reactionary?” “If he was reactionary, he wasn’t reactionary enough.
“Men like me, interested in joining together again the fragments of a lost Tradition, are bewildered by an event like Wilhelmsbad. Some guessed and remained silent; some knew and lied. And then it was too late: first the revolutionary whirlwind, then the uproar of nineteenth-century occultism. . . . Look at your list: a festival of bad faith and credulity, petty spite, reciprocal excommunications, secrets that circulated on every tongue. The theater of occultism.”
Agliè is so close and so far from the truth.
If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks,
Casaubon is undergoing the revelation after starting to accept the weird coincidences and numerology of conspiracy theories that it is all an unknowing metaphor for the Diabolical's impotence.
And who had celebrated the enchantment of Gothic? René de Chateaubriand. And who, in Bacon’s time, wrote Steps to the Temple? Richard Crashaw. And what about Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, René Char, Raymond Chandler? And Rick of Casablanca?
The point: all of them have the initials R.C. Wow, what a coincidence.
Or take those who live alone with a dog. They speak to him all day long; first they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dog understands them, he’s shy, he’s jealous, he’s hypersensitive; next they’re teasing him, making scenes, until they’re sure he’s become just like them, human, and they’re proud of it, but the fact is that they have become just like him: they have become canine.
Casaubon meditates on the process of studying then accepting the Diabolicals' ideas.
We were losing that mysterious and bright and most beautiful ability to say that Signor A has grown bestial—without thinking for a moment that he now has fur and fangs. The sick man, however, thinking “bestial,” immediately sees Signor A on all fours, barking or grunting.
A great summary of letting a study of a subject overtake your way of thinking.
You have dared to change the text of the romance of the world, and the romance of the world has taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a plot not of your making.
Belbo felt as if he were in his pajamas but unable to wake up;
A fantastic expression.
No, we had not been daydreaming: here was the looming proof of the Plan. But soon the Tower would realize that I was the spy, the enemy, the grain of sand in the gear system it served, soon it would imperceptibly dilate a diamond window in that lace of lead and swallow me, grab me in a fold of its hyperspace, and put me Elsewhere.
Casaubon grows disquieted while escaping an orgiastic night of murder by the Diabolicals and has already acquiesced to death by no longer resisting their conspiracy theories and ways of thinking, a method that promises death and lack of fulfillment in the end.
To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr. You don’t complain about being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can’t control; you aren’t responsible for the fact that your feet are not very prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don’t grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time. It’s because of the Envious Angels.
Eco summarizes fantastically the faith in someone who will tell the downtrodden that the reason they are faring so poorly in life isn't their fault. It's as true now as it was then.
It wasn’t that he refused to bow to the lust for power; he refused to bow to nonmeaning. He somehow knew that, fragile as our existence may be, however ineffectual our interrogation of the world, there is nevertheless something that has more meaning than the rest.
When Belpo dies, Casaubon examines the way that he was killed, for refusing to lie to the Diabolicals by telling them where his made-up map to the source of all magic is. He dies while elevating himself above his lot in life, by never sharing a secret that would be worthless the second it was revealed.
