Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

belong to the Reform Club, whose initials, R.C.,designate the reforming Rose + Cross? And this Reform Club standsin Pall Mall, suggesting once again the Dream ofPolyphile.

¡XMichel Lamy, JulesVerne, initie et initiateur, Paris, Payot, 1984, pp.237-238

The reconstruction tookus days and days. We would interrupt our work to confide in oneanother the latest connection. We read everything we could lay ourhands on¡Xencyclopedias, newspapers, cartoon strips, publishers'catalogs¡Xand read it squinting, seeking possible shortcuts. Atevery bookstall we stopped and rummaged; we sniffed newsstands,stole abundantly from the manuscripts of our Diabolicals, rushedtriumphantly into the office, slamming the latest find on a desk.As I recall those weeks, everything seems to have taken place at afrenzied pace, as in a Keystone Kops film, all jerks and jumps,with doors opening and closing at supersonic speed, cream piesflying, dashes up flights of steps, up and down, back and forth,old cars crashing, shelves collapsing in grocery stores amidavalanches of cans, bottles, soft cheeses, spurting siphons,exploding flour sacks. Yet the intermissions, the idle moments¡Xtherest of life going on around us¡XI remember as a story in slowmotion, the Plan taking gradual shape with the discipline ofgymnastics, or like the slow rotation of the discus thrower, thecautious sway of the shot-putter, the long tempos of golf, thesenseless waits of baseball. But whatever the rhythm was, luckrewarded us, because, wanting connections, we foundconnections¡Xalways, everywhere, and between everything. The worldexploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everythingpointed to everything else, everything explained everythingelse...

I said nothing about itto Lia, to avoid irritating her, and I even neglected Giulio. Iwould wake up in the middle of the night with the realization, forexample, that Ren6 des Cartes could make R.C. and that he had beenoverenergetic in seeking and then denying having found theRosicrucians. Why all that obsession with Method? Because it wasthrough Method that you arrived at the solution to the mystery thatwas fascinating all the initiates of Europe...And who hadcelebrated the enchantment of Gothic? Rene de Chateaubriand. Andwho, in Bacon's time, wrote Steps to the Temple! Richard Crashaw.And what about Ranieri de' Calzabigi, Ren6 Char, Raymond Chandler?And Rick of Casablanca?

86

This science, which wasnot lost, at least as far as its practice was concerned, was taughtto the cathedral builders by the monks of Ci-teaux...They wereknown, in the last century, as Compagnons du Tour de France. It wasto them that Eiffel turned to build his tower.

¡XL. Charpentier, Lesmysteres de la cathedrale de Chartres, Paris, Laffont, 1966, pp.55-56

Now we had the entiremodern age filled with industrious moles tunneling through theearth, spying on the planet from below. But there had to besomething else, another venture the Baconians had set in motion,whose results, whose stages were before everyone's eyes, though noone had noticed them...The ground had been punctured and the deepstrata tested, but the Celts and the Templars had not confinedthemselves to digging wells; they had planted their stations andaimed them straight to the heavens, to communicate from megalith tomegalith, and to catch the influences of the stars.

The idea came to Belboduring a night of insomnia. He leaned out the window and saw in thedistance, above the roofs of Milan, the lights of the steel towerof the Italian Radio, the great city antenna. A moderate, prudentBabel. And he understood.

"The Eiffel Tower," hesaid to us the next morning. "Why didn't we think of it before? Themetal megalith, the menhir of the last Celts, the hollow spiretaller than all Gothic spires. What need did Paris have of thisuseless monument? It's the celestial probe, the antenna thatcollects information from every hermetic valve stuck into theplanet's crust: the statues of Easter Island; Machu Picchu; theStatue of Liberty, conceived first by the initiate Lafayette; theobelisk of Luxor; the highest tower of Tomar; the Colossus ofRhodes, which still transmits from the depths of a harbor that noone can find; the temples of the Brahman jungle; the turrets of theGreat Wall; the top of Ayers Rock; the spires of Strasbourg, whichso delighted the initiate Goethe; the faces of Mount Rushmore¡Xhowmuch the initiate Hitchcock understood!¡Xand the TV antenna of theEmpire State Building. And tell me to what empire this creation ofAmerican initiates refers if not the empire of Rudolf of Prague!The Eiffel Tower picks up signals from underground and comparesthem with what comes from the sky. And who is it who gave us thefirst, terrifying movie image of the Tour Eiffel? Rene Clair, inParis qui dort. Rene Clair, R.C."

The entire history ofscience had to be reread. Even the space race becamecomprehensible, with those crazy satellites that did nothing butphotograph the crust of the globe to localize invisible tensions,submarine tides, currents of warmer air. And speak amongthemselves, speak to the Tower, to Stonehenge....

87

It is a remarkablecoincidence that the 1623 Folio, known by the name of Shakespeare,contains exactly thirty-six plays...

¡XW. F. C. Wigston,Francis Bacon versus Phantom Captain Shakespeare: The RosicrucianMask, London, Kegan Paul, 1891, p. 353

When we traded theresults of our fantasies, it seemed to us¡X and rightly¡Xthat wehad proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts soextraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believingthem, we would have been ashamed. We consoled ourselves with therealization¡Xunspoken, now, respecting the etiquette of irony¡Xthatwe were parodying the logic of our Diabolicals. But during the longintervals in which each of us collected evidence to produce at theplenary meetings, and with the clear conscience of those whoaccumulate material for a medley of burlesques, our brains grewaccustomed to connecting, connecting, connecting everything witheverything else, until we did it automatically, out of habit. Ibelieve that you can reach the point where there is no longer anydifference between developing the habit of pretending to believeand developing the habit of believing.

It's the old story ofspies: they infiltrate the secret service of the enemy, theydevelop the habit of thinking like the enemy, and if they survive,it's because they Ve succeeded. And before long, predictably, theygo over to the other side, because it has become theirs. Or takethose who live alone with a dog. They speak to him all day long;first they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dogunderstands them, he's shy, he's jealous, he's hypersensitive; nextthey're teasing him,