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

The thing whose addressI lost is not the End, it's the Beginning.

Not the object to bepossessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company.Misery, company, too many dactyls.

Nothing can dispel frommy mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creationof a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to AbsoluteOptimism.

I have committedfornication, true (or not true), but God is the one unable to solvethe problem of Evil. Come, let us pound the fetus in the mortarwith honey and pepper. Dieu le veult.

If belief is absolutelynecessary, let it be in a religion that doesn't make you feelguilty. A religion out of joint, fuming, subterranean, without anend. Like a novel, not like a theology.

Five paths to a singledestination. What a waste. Better a labyrinth that leads everywhereand nowhere. To die with style, live in the Baroque.

Only a bad Demiurgemakes us feel good.

But if there is nocosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent youthere. Exile from a place, moreover, that does notexist.

And what if there is aPlan, but it has eluded you¡Xand will elude you for alleternity?

When religion fails, artprovides. You invent the Plan, metaphor of the Unknowable One. Evena human plot can fill the void. They didn't publish my Hearts inExstasy because I don't belong to the Templar clique.

To live as if there werea Plan: the philosopher's stone.

If you can't beat them,join them. If there's a Plan, adjust to it.

Lorenza puts me to thetest. Humility. If I had the humility to appeal to the Angels, evenwithout believing in them, and to draw the right circle, I wouldhave peace. Maybe.

Believe there is asecret and you will feel like an initiate. It costsnothing.

To create an immensehope that can never be uprooted, because it has no root. Ancestorswho do not exist will never appear and say that you have betrayed.A religion you can keep while betraying it infinitely.

Like Andreae: to create,in jest, the greatest revelation of history and, while others aredestroyed by it, swear for the rest of your life that you hadnothing to do with it.

To create a truth with ahazy outline: when somebody tries to clarify it, you excommunicatehim. Accept only those hazier than yourself. Jamais d'ennemis adroite.

Why write novels?Rewrite history. The history that then comes true.

Why not set it inDenmark, Mr. William S.? Seven Seas Jim Johann Valentin AndreaeLuke-Matthew roams the archipelago of the Sunda between Patmos andAvalon, from the White Mountain to Mindanao, from Atlantis toThessalonica to the Council of Nicaea. Origen cuts off histesticles and shows them, bleeding, to the fathers of the City ofthe Sun, and Hiram sneers filioque filioque while Constantine digshis greedy nails into the hollow eye sockets of Robert Fludd, deathdeath to the Jews of the ghetto of Antioch, Dieu et mon droit, wavethe Beauceant, lay on, down with the Ophites and the Borborites,the snakes. Trumpets blare, and here come the ChevaliersBeinfaisants de la Cite" Sainte with the Moor's head bristling ontheir pike. The Rebis, the Rebis! Magnetic hurricane, the Towercollapses, Rachkovsky grins over the roasted corpse of Jacques deMolay.

* * *

I did not possess you,but I can blow up history.

* * *

If the problem is thisabsence of being and if what is is what is said, then the more wetalk, the more being there is.

The dream of science isthat there be little being, that it be concentrated and sayable, E= mc2. Wrong. To be saved at the very beginning, for all eternity,it is necessary for that being to be tangled. Like a serpent tiedinto knots by a drunken sailor: impossible to untie.

* * *

Invent, invent wildly,paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible tosummarize. A simple relay race among symbols, one says the name ofthe next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a saraband ofanagrams, endless. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Isthis not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of ananagram. Anagrams = ars magna.

* * *

That must have been howit happened. Belbo decided to take the universe of the Diabolicalsseriously, not because of an abundance of faith, but because of atotal lack of it.

Humiliated by hisincapacity to create (and all his life he had dined out on hisfrustrated desires and his unwritten pages, the former a metaphorof the latter and vice versa, all full of his alleged, impalpablecowardice), he came to realize that by inventing the Plan he hadactually created. He fell in love with his golem, found it a sourceof consolation. Life¡Xhis life, mankind's¡Xas art, and art asfalsehood. Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un livre (faux). Butnow he wanted to believe in this false book, because, as he hadalso written, if there was a Plan, then he would no longer bedefeated, diffident, a coward.

And this is what finallyhappened: he used the Plan, which he knew was unreal, to defeat arival he believed real. And then, aware that the Plan was masteringhim as if it existed, or as if he, Belbo, and the Plan were made ofthe same stuff, he went to Paris, toward a revelation, aliberation.

Tormented by the dailyremorse that for years and years he had lived only with ghosts ofhis own making, he was now finding solace in ghosts that werebecoming objective, since they were known also to others, eventhough he was the Enemy. Should he fling himself into the lion'smaw? Yes, because the lion taking shape was more real than SevenSeas Jim, more real than Cecilia, more real perhaps than LorenzaPellegrini herself.

Belbo, sick from so manymissed appointments, now felt able to make a real appointment. Anappointment he could not evade from cowardice, because now his backwas to the wall. Fear forced him to be brave. Inventing, he hadcreated the principle of reality.

106

List No. 5

6 undershirts

6 shorts

6handkerchiefs

has always puzzledscholars, principally because of the total absence ofsocks.

¡XWoody Alien, "TheMetterling List," Getting Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p.8

It was during thosedays, no more than a month ago, that Lia decided a vacation woulddo me good. "You look tired," she said. Maybe the