Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [248]
You never had Cecilia because the Archons made Annibale Canta-lamessa and Pio Bo unskilled even with the friendliest of the brass instruments. You fled the Canal gang because the Decans wanted to spare you for another holocaust. And the man with the scar has a talisman more powerful than yours.
A Plan, a guilty party. The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it’s His fault.
The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning.
Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company. Misery, company, too many dactyls.
Nothing can dispel from my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute Optimism.
I have committed fornication, true (or not true), but God is the one unable to solve the problem of Evil. Come, let us pound the fetus in the mortar with honey and pepper. Dieu le veult.
If belief is absolutely necessary, let it be in a religion that doesn’t make you feel guilty. A religion out of joint, fuming, subterranean, without an end. Like a novel, not like a theology.
Five paths to a single destination. What a waste. Better a labyrinth that leads everywhere and nowhere. To die with style, live in the Baroque.
Only a bad Demiurge makes us feel good.
But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.
And what if there is a Plan, but it has eluded you—and will elude you for all eternity?
When religion fails, art provides. You invent the Plan, metaphor of the Unknowable One. Even a human plot can fill the void. They didn’t publish my Hearts in Exstasy because I don’t belong to the Templar clique.
To live as if there were a 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 the test. Humility. If I had the humility to appeal to the Angels, even without believing in them, and to draw the right circle, I would have peace. Maybe.
Believe there is a secret and you will feel like an initiate. It costs nothing.
To create an immense hope that can never be uprooted, because it has no root. Ancestors who 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 are destroyed by it, swear for the rest of your life that you had nothing to do with it.
To create a truth with a hazy outline: when somebody tries to clarify it, you excommunicate him. Accept only those hazier than yourself. Jamais d’ennemis a droite.
Why write novels? Rewrite history. The history that then comes true.
Why not set it in Denmark, Mr. William S.? Seven Seas Jim Johann Valentin Andreae Luke-Matthew roams the archipelago of the Sunda between Patmos and Avalon, from the White Mountain to Mindanao, from Atlantis to Thessalonica to the Council of Nicaea. Origen cuts off his testicles and shows them, bleeding, to the fathers of the City of the Sun, and Hiram sneers filioque filioque while Constantine digs his greedy nails into the hollow eye sockets of Robert Fludd, death death to the Jews of the ghetto of Antioch, Dieu et mon droit, wave the Beauceant, lay on, down with the Ophites and the Borborites, the snakes. Trumpets blare, and here come the Chevaliers Beinfaisants de la Cite” Sainte with the Moor’s head bristling on their pike. The Rebis, the Rebis! Magnetic hurricane, the Tower collapses, Rachkovsky grins over the roasted corpse of Jacques de Molay.
* * *
I did not possess you, but I can blow up history.
* * *
If the problem is this absence of being and if what is is what is said, then the more we talk, the more being there is.
The dream of science is that there be little being, that it be concentrated and sayable, E = mc2. Wrong. To be saved at the very beginning, for all eternity, it