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.

Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that once he realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided to become, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no point in writing without serious motivation.

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.

I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of two ideas—both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can’t hurt, and you might get better.

“Ma gavte la nata. Take out the cork.” You say it to one who is full of himself, the idea being that what causes him to swell and strut is the pressure of a cork stuck in his behind. Remove it, and phsssssh, he returns to the human condition.

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.

In those halcyon days I believed that the source of enigma was stupidity. Then the other evening in the periscope I decided that the most terrible enigmas are those that mask themselves as madness. 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.

“All the world’s follies,” he replied, “turn up in publishing houses sooner or later. But the world’s follies may also contain flashes of the wisdom of the Most High, so the wise man observes folly with humility.”

You see? I said to myself. To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn’t exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone. What happened to me was like what might happen to a pedantic ethnologist who has spent years studying cannibalism. He challenges the smugness of the whites by assuring everybody that actually human flesh is delicious. Then one day a doubter decides to see for himself and performs the experiment—on him. As the ethnologist is devoured piece by piece, he hopes, for he will never know who was right, that at least he is delicious, which will justify the ritual and his death.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it’s real and you’re not to blame.

“is the very image of what the ethnology textbooks call Brazilian syncretism. An ugly word, in the official view. But in its loftiest sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come. . . .