Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [298]
His father joined him and, guilelessly, with the serenity of one who knows the laws of life, said: “In a month, if all goes as it should, we’ll be going home. You can’t play the trumpet in the city. Our landlord would evict us. So you’ll have to forget that. If you really like music, we’ll have you take piano lessons.” And then, seeing the boy with moist eyes, he added: “Come now, silly. Don’t you realize the bad days are over?”
The next day, Jacopo returned the trumpet to Don Tico Two weeks later, the family left ***, to rejoin the future.
MALKHUT
120
“But that which seems to me should be deplored is the fact that I see some senseless and foolish idolaters who no more imitate the excellence of the cult of Egypt, than the shadow approaches the nobility of the body, and who seek Divinity, for which they have no reason whatsoever, in the excrements of dead and inanimate things. These idolaters, nevertheless, mock not only those of us who are divine and sagacious worshipers but also those of us who are reputed to be beasts. And what is worse, with this they triumph by seeing their mad rites in so great repute...”
“Let not this trouble you, oh Momus,” said Isis, “because fate has ordained the vicissitude of shadows and light.” “But the evil,” answered Momus, “is that they hold for certain that they are in the light.”
—Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Third Dialogue, Second Part, translated by Arthur D. Imerti, Rutgers University Press, 1964, p. 236
I should be at peace. I have understood. Don’t some say that peace comes when you understand? I have understood. I should be at peace. Who said that peace derives from the contemplation of order, order understood, enjoyed, realized without residuum, in joy and triumph, the end of effort? All is clear, limpid; the eye rests on the whole and on the parts and sees how the parts have conspired to make the whole; it perceives the center where the lymph flows, the breath, the root of the whys...
I should be at peace. From the window of Uncle Carlo’s study I look at the hill, and the little slice of rising moon. The Bricco’s broad hump, the more tempered ridges of the hills in the background tell the story of the slow and drowsy stirrings of Mother Earth, who stretches and yawns, making and unmaking blue plains in the dread flash of a hundred volcanoes. The Earth turned in her sleep and traded one surface for another. Where ammonoids once fed, diamonds. Where diamonds once grew, vineyards. The logic of the moraine, of the landslip, of the avalanche. Dislodge one pebble, by chance, it becomes restless, rolls down, in its descent leaves space (ah, horror vacui!), another pebble falls on top of it, and there’s height. Surfaces. Surfaces upon surfaces. The wisdom of the Earth. And of Lia.
Why doesn’t understanding give me peace? Why love Fate if Fate kills you just as dead as Providence or the Plot of the Archons? Perhaps I haven’t understood, after all; perhaps I am missing one piece of the puzzle, one space.
Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.
Now I know what the Law of the Kingdom is, of poor, desperate, tattered Malkhut, where Wisdom has gone into exile, groping to recover its former lucidity. The truth of Malkhut, the only truth that shines in the night of the Sefirot, is that Wisdom is revealed naked in Malkhut, and its mystery lies not in existence but in the leaving of existence. Afterward, the Others begin again.
And, with the others, the Diabolicals, seeking abysses where the secret of their madness lies hidden.
Along the