Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [249]
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Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to summarize. A simple relay race among symbols, one says the name of the next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endless. And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an anagram. Anagrams = ars magna.
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That must have been how it happened. Belbo decided to take the universe of the Diabolicals seriously, not because of an abundance of faith, but because of a total lack of it.
Humiliated by his incapacity to create (and all his life he had dined out on his frustrated desires and his unwritten pages, the former a metaphor of the latter and vice versa, all full of his alleged, impalpable cowardice), he came to realize that by inventing the Plan he had actually created. He fell in love with his golem, found it a source of consolation. Life—his life, mankind’s—as art, and art as falsehood. Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un livre (faux). But now he wanted to believe in this false book, because, as he had also written, if there was a Plan, then he would no longer be defeated, diffident, a coward.
And this is what finally happened: he used the Plan, which he knew was unreal, to defeat a rival he believed real. And then, aware that the Plan was mastering him as if it existed, or as if he, Belbo, and the Plan were made of the same stuff, he went to Paris, toward a revelation, a liberation.
Tormented by the daily remorse that for years and years he had lived only with ghosts of his own making, he was now finding solace in ghosts that were becoming objective, since they were known also to others, even though he was the Enemy. Should he fling himself into the lion’s maw? Yes, because the lion taking shape was more real than Seven Seas Jim, more real than Cecilia, more real perhaps than Lorenza Pellegrini herself.
Belbo, sick from so many missed appointments, now felt able to make a real appointment. An appointment he could not evade from cowardice, because now his back was to the wall. Fear forced him to be brave. Inventing, he had created the principle of reality.
106
List No. 5
6 undershirts
6 shorts
6 handkerchiefs
has always puzzled scholars, principally because of the total absence of socks.
—Woody Alien, “The Metterling List,” Getting Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p. 8
It was during those days, no more than a month ago, that Lia decided a vacation would do me good. “You look tired,” she said. Maybe the Plan had worn me out. For that matter, the baby, as its grandparents said, needed clean air. Some friends lent us a house in the mountains.
We didn’t leave at once. There were things to attend to in Milan, and Lia said that nothing was more restful than taking a little vacation in the city when you knew you’d soon be going off on your real vacation.
Now, for the first time, I talked to Lia about the Plan. Until then she had been too busy with the baby. She knew vaguely that Belbo, Diotallevi, and I were working on some puzzle, and that it occupied whole days and nights, but I hadn’t said anything to her about it, not since the day she preached me that sermon about the psychosis of resemblances. Maybe I was ashamed.
I described the whole Plan to her, down to the smallest details, and told her about Diotallevi’s illness, feeling guilty, as if I had done something wrong. I tried to present the Plan for what it was: a display of bravura.
Lia said: “Pow, I don’t like your story.”
“It isn’t beautiful?”
“The sirens were beautiful, too. Listen, what do you know about your unconscious?’’
“Nothing. I’m not even sure I have one.”
“There. Imagine that a Viennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the whole business of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had never dreamed and little Hanses he had never met... And what happened? Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to become