UNTITLED

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, translated from the Italian by William Weaver (New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, 1989) ("You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your horoscope day by day." "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." Id. at 49. "'He's old enough to be your father,' I said to Amparo as I dragged her through the stalls. 'Even my great-great-grandfather. He implied that he's at least a thousand years old. Are you jealous of a pharaoh's mummy?' 'I'm jealous of anyone who makes a light bulb flash on in your head.' 'How wonderful. That's love.'" Id. at 177-178. "'Who among us is living in the past? You, who would bestow the horrors of the toiling industrial age upon this country, or I, who wish that our poor Europe might recover the naturalness and faith of these children of slaves?' 'Jesus,' Amparo said in a nasty hiss, 'You know as well as I do that it's just another way of keeping them quiet. ...' 'Not quiet. Capable of expectation. Without a sense of expectation, there can be no paradise; isn't that what you Europeans have taught us?'" Id. at 186. "'The one true answer?' 'Of course. That there's nothing to understand, Synarchy is God.' 'God.' 'Yes. Mankind can't endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found--God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.' 'Then I should have told him that people put bombs on trains because they're looking for God?' 'Why not?'" Id. at 318-319. "'Signora, there's nothing in this world that demands more caution than the truth. To tell the truth is like leeching one's own heart....'" Id. at 349-350. "'If the Templars, the real Templars, did leave a secret and did establish some kind of continuity, then it is necessary to seek them out, and to seek them in the places where they could most easily camouflage themselves, perhaps by inventing rites and myths in order to move unobserved, like fish in water. What do the police do when they seek the archvillian, the evil mastermind? They dig into the lower depths, the notorious dives filled with petty crooks who will never conceive the grandiose crimes of the dark genius the police are after. What does the terrorist leader do to recruit new acolytes? Where does he look for them and find them? He circulates in the haunts of the pseudosubversive, the fellow-travelers who would never have the courage to be the real thing, but who openly ape the attitudes of their idols. Concealed light is best sought in fires, or in the brush where, after the blaze, the flames go on brooding under twigs, under trampled muck. What better hiding place for the true Templar than in the crowd of his caricatures?'" Id. at 354. "You don't complain about being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can't control; you aren't responsible for the fact that your feet are not very prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don't grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time. It's because of the Envious Angels." "The same applies to everyday life. Take stock-market crashes. They happen because each individual makes a wrong move, and all the wrong moves put together create panic. Then whoever lacks steady nerves asks himself: Who's behind this plot, who's benefiting? He has to find an enemy, a plotter, or it will be, God forbid, his fault." "If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model.... Diotallevi's remark was: 'Of course, you attribute to the other what you're doing yourself, and since what you're doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you're doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that--yes--what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand.'" Id. at 619-620.).