Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [29]
“Invariably?”
“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden...”He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”
“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”
“What makes you trust me?”
“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”
A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”
“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.
“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”
“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”
11
His sterility was infinite. It was part of the ecstasy.
—E. M. Cioran, Le mauvais demiurge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, “Pensees ftranglees”
The conversation at Pilade’s had shown me the public Belbo. But a keen observer would have been able to sense the melancholy behind the sarcasm. Not that Belbo’s sarcasm was the mask. The mask, perhaps, was the private confessing he did. Or perhaps his melancholy itself was the mask, a contrivance to hide a deeper melancholy.
There is a document in which he tried to fictionalize what he told me about his job when I went to Garamond the next day. It contains all his precision and passion, the disappointment of an editor who could write only through others while yearning for creativity of his own. It also has the moral severity that led him to punish himself for desiring something to which he did not feel entitled. Though he painted his desire in pathetic and garish hues, I never knew a man who could pity himself with such contempt.
FILENAME: Seven Seas Jim
Tomorrow, see young Cinti.
1. Good monograph, scholarly, perhaps a bit too scholarly.
2. In the conclusion, the comparison between Catullus, the poetae novi, and today’s avant-garde is the best part.
3. Why not make this the introduction?
4. Convince him. He’ll say that such flights of fancy don’t belong in a philological series. He’s afraid of alienating his professor, who is supposed to write the authoritative preface. A brilliant idea in the last two pages might go unnoticed, but at the beginning it would be too conspicuous, it would irritate the academic powers that be.
5. If, however, it is put into italics, in a conversational form, separate from the actual scholarship, then the hypothesis remains only a hypothesis and doesn’t undermine the seriousness of the work. And readers will be captivated at once; they’ll approach the book in a totally different way.
Am I urging him to an act of freedom—or am I using him to write my own book?
Transforming books with a word here, a word there. Demiurge for the work of others. Tapping at the hardened clay, at the statue someone else has already carved. Instead of taking soft clay and molding my own. Give Moses the right tap with the hammer,