Memorial to a familiar stranger

I read of the death of Umberto Eco yesterday.  'Oh no,' was the mundane, involuntary phrase on my lips.  My first wild thoughts were to proclaim it to every friend and acquaintance as a calamity that ought to have cracked the Earth to its mantle.  A great man was dead; a man whose insights excited so many of my own half-reasoned ruminations.

Dead!  How many anecdotes, how many hidden plots, how many conjectures died in that hour?  How much was planned and left undone?

I feel a debt to this utter stranger for the joy and sorrow I have found in his words.  A week prior and I could have established a discourse with him (not that I would have) about the protagonist of The Mysterious Flame, or questioned him about the powder of sympathy, oil of vitriol, or Seven Seas Jim.

And I find it so strange, considering him now one of those dead with whom I can commune only through the words he leaves behind.

May he find paradise somewhere, rusticating in some splendid mountain villa, loafing forever without a past or a future.

Paradise

Umberto Eco, tr. Geoffrey Brock, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Harcourt, 2004) p. 216

Back at the house, I had a craving for an apple, and I entered the lower rooms of the central wing.  Strolling among the fruits and vegetables, I noticed that some of the large rooms on the ground floor were being used for storage and that in the back of one room were stacks of deck chairs.  I carried one into the yard.  I sat down facing the panorama, skimmed the newspapers, realized I was barely interested in the present, turned the chair around, and began looking at the front of the house and the hills behind it.  I asked myself what I was looking for, what I wanted, would it not be enough to sit here looking at that hill that is so beautiful, as the novel said, what was it called?  To raise three pavilions, Lord, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah, and loaf without a past and without a future.  Perhaps that is what paradise is like.

Credulity, Part One

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, tr. William Weaver (Harcourt, 1989), p. 49:

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us.  We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.  When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature.  My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off.  "The purpose of this magazine," I pontificated, quoting the ad, "is to educate the reader in an entertaining way."  "The purpose of your magazine," my father replied without looking up from his paper, "is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can."
That day, I began to be incredulous.

Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous.  I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind.  Such is credulity.

Casualties of the Propaganda War

Umberto Eco, tr. Geoffrey Brock, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Harcourt, 2004), pp. 233-4.

Since it would clearly have been difficult simply to dispatch a platoon of SS or Blackshirts to occupy New York, we had, for several years already, been waging war in comic books, from which the speech balloons had disappeared, replaced by captions beneath each picture.  Then--as I must have seen happen in various comics--the American characters simply began to vanish, replaced by Italian imitations, and in the end--and this, I think, was the last, most painful barrier to fall--the famous mouse was killed.  The same adventures continued as if nothing had happened, but from one week to the next, without any notice, the protagonist ceased to be Toplino [Mickey Mouse] and became a certain Toffolino, who was a human, not a mouse, although he still  had four fingers, like all Disney's anthropomorphic animals, and his friends, though also humanized, continued to go by their original names.