Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [27]
“In real life.”
“I study.”
“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”
“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”
“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”
“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”
“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”
“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”
“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”
“Casaubon.”
“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”
“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”
“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”
“And that covers everybody?”
“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”
“Idealtypen.”
“Very good. You know German?”
“Enough for bibliographies.”
“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”
“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”
“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”
“No,” the girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”
“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”
“Getting back to the lunatics.”
“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I ‘m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”
“All right. My round.”
“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”
“Let’s.”
“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”
“Yes, I know a few of those.”
“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”
“I do.”
“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous etes negre?’ Murat asks.