Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994:
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven - the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions.....
And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.
This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language.
That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and a not-too-well-simulated, ironic distance, makes him a top artist by any standard.
There's an internet subculture that might appeal to you: people who write elaborate, thoroughly scathing reviews on Amazon for widely admired masterpieces.
That's Calvino's first novel, and it has a completely different style - and is much more boring as far as I remember- from everything he wrote afterwards. I think it was often chosen in Italian high schools for political reasons - it's a story about the Italian resistenza, the fight of partisans against fascists from which the modern Italian republic was born.
His subsequent novels and collections of short stories depart completely from that neo-realistic style. The way to describe them is possibly "a literary Bach" - his stories seem to develop fantastic themes in an endlessly imaginative way, exploring all the possibilities afforded by the theme, (loose) internal consistency and language. My favourites are "Cosmicomics" and "The invisible cities" .
Paganistic druids without the priestly shroud, revealing all sources of revelation to man, existence its barest form, for all to extend, rewrite, and revise for the solitary path of revelation must bear the unique fingerprint of the journeyman.
Anciently, there was the UNIX. But the UNIX was held close by those who had received it, and the world trembled in darkness, because there was no UNIX to light the way. But then came Linus Torvalds, attempting to discover which of the systems was true, and, as he reviewed the ancient operating systems, discovered wisdom enough to seek the UNIX.
And BEHOLD, as Linus went forth to meditate on which operating system was best, he was visited by the UNIX in a pillar of Code. The UNIX told him that all operating systems had departed from the best way, and informed Linus where he must go to seek a restoration of the true ways of UNIX.
And Linus was led to the side of the hill Codemorah, wherein he discovered golden algorithms and clear glass compilers. And will the clear glass compilers, he translated the golden algorithms into this: the Linux operating system. It is evidence of his prophesional calling, and any who use it can attest the Linus was truly shown the best way, through the Spirit and Power of UNIX.
What an utterly gratuitous comparison; that kind of thing could be said about almost anything (beef meat is Catholic, horse meat is Protestant! Reddit is Catholic, HN is Protestant! etc.)
Eco's journalistic pieces are quite short and he tends to take an everyday thing and run with it making its absurdity show up more with each paragraph.
There are collections in English of the newspaper articles available. Each piece can be quite entertaining but the books of collected articles were not intended to be read from beginning to end.
One remarkable thing about The Name of the Rose is that the characters in it don't think and talk like modern people who happen to have been transported into the Middle Ages. They seem to think differently -- about what's possible, what people can expect from life, how you know things, what counts as an argument...
Possibly my favorite part:
"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you say it?"
"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?"
"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."
The "mystic from your land" was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that in his Tractatus 591 years after that conversation was set, in modern rather than medieval German ("Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist") - "he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it".
Umber Eco was one of the greatest scholars of Middle Age's philosophy. It is a great delight for all of us that he decided to share his knowledge in the form of a Novel. I don't think you can find any other writer capable of translating the thinking of ordinary men from Middle Ages into a book like he did.
I really doubt we know very much about how people thought back then. There are many filters between what was thought, who knew how to write it down, the form people used to express thought in written form, what happened to be copied or survive.
Ex: People don't actually believe in Santa Clause, but if you randomly chose 10,000 pages to represent US thought from 1800 to now. Them handed them to scholars in the future there is a solid chance you they would assume it was the major religion.
I suspect sea monsters may simply be a similar tall tail and we lost context.
PS: Ok, we can reasonably assume people got hungry :D
It's funny how we consider certain cultural behaviors to be wildly different when they're "ours" versus "theirs" even if they're pretty similar if you can step back and observe them objectively.
"If you used historical techniques on us, you'd get completely the wrong idea!" Maybe. Or maybe you'd finally get the right idea.
I'd love to write more, but I've finished ingesting the stimulants that allow me to tolerate my oppressive culture (drinking coffee), and I'm going to take a short trip to worship the revered dead (visit the National Mall).
Imagine trying to explain to an ancient Greek philosopher how Christianity is monotheistic.
So, you have one God, but also a demigod, who is his son. There's a god of the underworld you call satan, and a number of divine or demonic creatures called angels and demons. Ok, throw in some ancestor worship in the form of saints.
This monotheistic pantheon would have sounded reassuringly familiar your ancient Greek interlocutor.
It is true that we can never know this completely, but that is true about anything else in history. You would be amazed, however, to see what can be learned from reading the original languages, researching their homes, household utensils, popular art, etc.
I just pulled Baudolino back off the shelf this morning, going to try to make it through this time. I love the idea of the untrustworthy narrator, and the writing is excellent, though dense. like Foucault's Pendulum, I find Baudolino hard to read straight through, though I'm sure it will ultimately be just as rewarding.
Historians are not machine learning algorithms, they are capable of deriving much more complex inferences. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't believe Santa Claus was a major religion.
It's not medieval philosophy, with "years after that conversation was set", the poster you're replying to means 600 years. The book should not be seen as an historic work.
That's one of many modern references in the book (to Borges, Sherlock Holmes, the conventions of the whodunnit, etc) but I think it's clear that some effort is being made by Eco to exhibit the thought processes and preoccupations of the medieval mind.
Anachronistic quotations happened quite often in ancient and medieval writing, so Eco was just having a bit of fun.
I agree that the Name of the Rose is not an historic work (incidentally so did Eco), but plenty of medievalists think that it is good enough to be a useful teaching tool:
Because books speak of books, as with the manuscript, which is a letter about a book about a book about another book, until at the lowest level the story speaks of even more lost works, whose ideas survive through the hand of a scribe who does not understand them. And the burning of the library becomes a burning bush, releasing not destroying knowledge, for it is the light that matters.
It is my favourite of his as well. And thank you for sharing the joke about Wittgenstein. :)
Foucault's Pendulum was maybe the most transformative book I've ever read - it changed how I think about literature (and of course the Knights Templar). Ah well, guess it's time to reread it. :(
It took me four months to get through that thing, what with its weird random digressions. One chapter would be talking about the Knights Templar building treasure-tunnels under France, and suddenly the next chapter would open with a paragraph explaining why a woman's physiology is better suited for playing pinball than a man's.
A compelling read, but I was never quite sure what facts would end up being important to the plot.
Well, yeah. Foucault's Pendulum is to me what Finnegan's Wake is apparently to many others - certainly not a casual read; more something to pick apart slowly and ponder the subtle mysteries of. But even underneath all the digressions and metaphysics, I still find the core story enjoyable as well.
Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see.
The Illuminatus Trilogy is a couple of guys getting stoned and screwing around with various goofy ideas. Like a lot of postmodern stuff, it doesn't take much of anything, especially its subject seriously.
Foucault's Pendulum is a very smart guy who knows a lot, pointing out that, if you peel an onion you won't find anything in the center.
I think there's rather more to the Illuminatus trilogy than that. And I say that as big fan of Eco who has enjoyed his deeply obscure stuff as well as his more well-known works.
Illuminatus! is a work of satire, so it not taking itself seriously is part of the point. If you want to really get something out of it you have look beyond the psychedelic sillyness, and read up one some of the countless philosophical/occult concepts and historical oddities referenced in the story.
Another layer to the book is that there were plenty of real conspiracies in Italian politics during the period in which it is set. It was published at around the time that information on Gladio [1] became public.
>A compelling read, but I was never quite sure what facts would end up being important to the plot.
The plot is seldom the main point in literature, especially good literature -- it's mostly a vehicle to convey thoughts and observations about life, the universe and everything as opposed to the end goal (as in a (common) detective story or a pulp thriller).
I wish writers (and readers) really understood that. It is so boring to open a book that reads just like a Hollywood movie script and has no depth to justify reading.
That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.
I guess it's a matter of perspective, but my first read was similar, and it made me feel smart.
I actually listed all the words I had to look up on a 3x5 index card and used it for a bookmark. I no longer have it but I definitely remember "numinous" was on there, along with many others.
I don't know which translation have you read. The fact is that translators rarely understand all the subtleties of Eco's original, translate it incorrectly and thus the translations are much more confusing than they should be.
English readers were very fortunate to have William Weaver as the translator. Umberto Eco himself said --only half in jest-- that Weaver's translation of the Name of the Rose was better than the original.
If a child cannot understand the scope and themes of, say, Montaigne's Essais, is this a fault of Montaigne's? The Pendulum is similarly loaded with concepts and ideas.
For me it was the only book ever where, once I'd put it down, I couldn't remember where I had been when I picked it up again (after some time had passed).
That's because it keeps jumping from subject to subject, revisiting some, and sometimes even repeating the same information in different ways. I was completely lost after a while, but I didn't have the heart to start from the beginning. It's a very big book.
I did enjoy it though, in a way because I got so lost in it, that after a while it didn't make any difference where I was and what I'd read. It was a bit like floating into someone's dreams.
Also, it put me off my New Age books for ever - you know the ones, Alistair Crowley, Dion Fortune and the like. I'm much happier with technology than magic, thank you. Thank you professor Eco, that is.
If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini's fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here
and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.
Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?
Normally I tell everyone to read The Name of the Rose first and be happy, but for you I think you should start with The Mysterious Flame of queen Loana, even though it's one of his less accessible works. Much of it is a fictionalized memoir on how fascism became embedded in the fabric of daily life during Mussolini's reign, although this concern with mass movements and the dangers they pose to thinking individuals is a consistent theme in his work.
> Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.
He wrote a whole book about this: The Prague Cemetery.
For those who haven't read anything by Eco but want something more digestible on a Friday evening than a novel, I highly recommend his essay Ur-Fascism. Eco was brilliant and had a clear-eyed view on the lasting impact of the Middle Ages into today... and it's pretty clear how growing up in a fascist society impacted his views.
I started reading Numero Zero for the first time a few days ago, and decided to stop, because I had a feeling he might be dying soon. It's the last book of his I have left to read, and I wanted to make sure I had something to read of his after he passed. Sorry I don't have to wait.
RIP -- Mr. Eco. Your books instilled in me the love of reading when no one else could. I will always owe you one.
Absolutely. A century has around 36500 days. If you compose a list of 100 people who died on that century, your chances of hitting the same day more than once are estimated at almost 13%. As a matter of fact, even 28 people will get you over the 1%.
It's even worse than that... According to Wikipedia:
"Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, but England was still using the Julian calendar. Shakespeare's death on 23 April 1616 (Julian) was equivalent to 3 May 1616 (Gregorian). This was 10 days after Cervantes was buried and 11 days after he died."
One of Shakespeare's lost works, a collaboration with John Fletcher, was the History of Cardenio which is believed to have been based on a section of Don Quixote.
Don Quixote was quite popular in English so it's kind of exciting to think of Shakespeare reading Don Quixote.
I'm going to re-read The Name of the Rose this weekend and raise a glass in thanks to all the pleasure that this wonderful writer has added to my life.
"The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possesed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them." Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 491.
In addition to literary works, Umberto Eco also had a hand in designing a card game. The game used custom designed cards to represent characters and verbs which the players would use to tell a story.
Some information (and photos) are available at Board Game Geek:
Thanks. The idea reminds me of another great Italian novelist, Italo Calvino, and his 1973 novel "The Castle of Crossed Destinies". From Wikipedia:
"Its narrative details a meeting among travellers who are inexplicably unable to speak after travelling through a forest. The characters in the novel recount their tales via Tarot cards, which are reconstructed by the narrator." (that is, the narrator observes the sequence of cards chosen and reconstructs the stories after them).
We read Name of the Rose in my 10th grade English class and it was a tome that challenged us all for the couple of weeks that we pored over it. I love that book. I've read it one other time since then and it's amazing the number of layers that continue to appear when you read it a second (and, presumably, a third) time. When you spend so much time dissecting somebody's work, you develop a sort of relationship with them, one that forms easily when you have a teacher that distills a deep appreciation for the work you're knee deep in trying to understand.
After the 10th or 11th reading of Rose I had internalized the book well enough that I wasn't finding anything new and could recall whole pages of it from memory, but I keep rereading it every year or so because of the sheer sensual pleasure it evokes. I must be up to about 25 readings now and I was just thinking it was time for another.
I had kind of that experience with the Aeneid, and my friend had kind of that experience with the Divine Comedy. There's a lot of it out there to be had when people are lucky enough to get into the right situation with the right people!
It's probably worth mentioning that very recently Eco, along with other writers such as Hanif Kureishi and Tahar Ben Jelloun, decided to leave his long-time publisher, Bompiani, and start a new publishing house, named "La nave di Teseo" (Theseus' vessel). It did that at 83, investing 2 millions euros in the process. Remarkable.
I can't believe how many legendary people have died in the last few months. I still remember reading Foucault's Pendulum when it came out in English - I was too young to really dig the story at the time, but I can recall struggling to get my head around some his prose because he was just on a whole different level from the other books I had been reading back then.
I read Baudolino some years ago, but didn't come away from it with the same sense of awe that I got from reading Name of the Rose, or Foucault's Pendulum.
Hearing the news I couldn't help but think about the first game I've ever played, "La Abadia del Crimen", a version of "The Name of the Rose", for Amstrad CPC.
"On Friday (February 19) the author's reps officially confirmed that Umberto Eco is not dead. “He joins the long list of celebrities who have been victimized by this hoax. He's still alive and well, stop believing what you see on the Internet,” they said."
- Wikipedia reverted the notice of his death, saying it was a false rumor:
Mediamass is a terrible website. They flood their site with "X dying is a hoax", so they build high pagerank on that phrase, and when someone actually dies, they are first.
> La conferma della scomparsa dell'autore de "Il nome della Rosa" e de "Il pendolo di Focault" è stata data dalla famiglia a Repubblica. La morte è avvenuta alle 22.30 di ieri sera nella sua abitazione.
Which says that his family has confirmed it to La Repubblica, which is a respected Italian newspaper.
Mediamass is a parody site, similar to The Onion but not as funny. If you look on any of their articles, they contain a disclaimer, "UPDATE: This story appears to be false," which links to a page[1] explaining that everything is made up.
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven - the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions.....
And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.
(from here: http://jowett.web.cern.ch/jowett/EcoMACDOS.htm )