"The Name of the Rose"

[fiefoe]

Umberto Eco's detective story is turning out to be a good bedtime read. There's always something interesting being said no wonder how soon I grow sleepy.

William and his callow sidekick:

• I grow old as the world does, waiting to be lost in the bottomless pit of silent and deserted divinity, sharing in the light of angelic intelligences;
• The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head... the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance.
• Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature's ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.... "Roger Bacon, whom I venerate as my master..."
• my ignorance... assumed the quite diaphanous form of a universal idea.. So the ideas, which I was using earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of 'horse'; and signs and signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things. {白马非马？}
• "Why do you insist on speaking of criminal acts without referring to their diabolical cause?" "... So to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky."
• (Roger Bacon) taught.. that there is only one way to prepare against (the coming of Antichrist): study the secrets of nature, use knowledge to better the human race.
• But often the treasures of learning must be defended, not against the simple but, rather, against other learned men.
• "So, think whether it is not less-how shall I say it?-less costly for our minds to believe that Adelmo ..(killed himself.) ... Everything is explained, using a smaller number of causes."
• Learning does not consist of only knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
• "Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men's bodies leave every legible writing. But this palimpsest is badly scraped. "