Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [121]
I told them about a strange thing I had seen in Paris, a bookshop near quai Saint-Michel. Its symmetrical windows advertised its own schizophrenia: on one side, books on computers and the electronics of the future; on the other, occult sciences. And it was the same inside: Apple and cabala.
“Unbelievable,” Belbo said.
“Obvious,” Diotallevi said. “Or, at least, you’re the last person who should be surprised, Jacopo. The world of machines seeking to rediscover the secret of creation: letters and numbers.”
Garamond said nothing. He had clasped his hands as if in prayer, and his eyes were turned heavenward. Then he smacked his hands together. “What you’ve said today confirms an idea of mine. For a while now IVe...But all in good time; it needs more thought. Meanwhile, carry on. You’ve done well, Casaubon. We must look at your contract again; you’re a valuable colleague. And, yes, put in plenty of cabala and computers. Computers are made with silicon, aren’t they?”
“But silicon isn’t a metal. It’s a nonmetallic element.”
“Metallic, nonmetallic, why split hairs? What is this, Rosa rosarum? Computers and cabala.”
“Cabala isn’t a metal either,” I said.
He accompanied us to the door. At the threshold he said: “Casaubon, publishing is an art, not a science. Let’s not think like revolutionaries, eh? Those days are past. Put in the cabala. Oh, yes, about your expenses: I’ve taken the liberty of disallowing the couchette. Not to be stingy, believe me. It’s just that research requires—how shall I put it?—a Spartan spirit. Otherwise you lose your faith.”
He summoned us again a few days later, telling Belbo there was a visitor in his office he wanted us to meet.
We went. Garamond was entertaining a fat gentleman with a face like a tapir’s, no chin, a little blond mustache beneath a large, animal nose. I thought I recognized him; then I knew who it was: Professor Bramanti, the man I had gone to hear in Rio, the referendary or whatever of that Rosicrucian order.
“Professor Bramanti,” Garamond said, “believes this is the right moment for a smart publisher, alert to the cultural climate of the time, to inaugurate a line of books on the occult sciences.”
“For...Manutius,” Belbo suggested.
“Why, naturally.” Signor Garamond smiled shrewdly. “Professor Bramanti—who, by the way, was recommended to me by my dear friend Dr. De Amicis, the author of that splendid volume Chronicles of the Zodiac, which we brought out this year-has been lamenting the fact that the few works published on his subject—almost invariably by frivolous and unreliable houses-fail to do justice to the wealth, the profundity of this field of studies...”
“Given the failure of the Utopias of the modern world,” Bramanti said, “the time is ripe for a reassessment of the culture of the forgotten past.”
“What you say is the sacred truth, Professor. But you must forgive our—I don’t like to say ignorance—our unfamiliarity with the subject. When you speak of occult sciences, what exactly do you have in mind? Spiritualism, astrology, black magic?”
Bramanti made a gesture of dismay. “Please! That’s just the sort of nonsense that’s foisted on the ingenuous. I’m talking about science, occult though it be. Of course, that may include astrology when appropriate, but not the kind that tells a typist that next Sunday she’ll meet the man of her dreams. No. What I mean, to give an example, would be a serious study of the de-cans.”
“Yes, I see. Scientific. It’s in our line, to be sure; but could you be a little more specific?”
Bramanti settled into his chair and looked around the room, as if to seek astral inspiration. “I’d be happy to give you some examples, of course. I would say that the ideal reader of a collection of this sort would be a Rosicrucian adept, and therefore an expert in magiam, in necromantiam, in astrologiam, in geo-mantiam, in pyromantiam, in hydromantiam, in chaomantiam, in medicinam adeptam, to quote the book of Azoth, which, as the Raptus philosophorum explains, was given to Staurophorus