"The Name of the Rose" [.]

[fiefoe]

I never bother to watch extra features on DVDs, so imagine my surprise when I read through Eco's postscript with much pleasure:

• “stat rosa pristina nomie, nomina nuda tenemus”
• Abelard used the example of the sentence Nula rosa est to demonstrate how language can speak of both the nonexistent and the destroyed.
• A novel (is) a machine for generating interpretations.  / concinnity
• Most illuminating pages on the artistic process have been written by minor artists, who achieved modest effects but knew how to ponder their own processes: Vasari, Horatio Greenough, Aaron Copland...
• Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis.
• When two of my characters spoke while walking from the refectory to the cloister, I wrote with the plan before my eyes; and when they reached their destination, they stopped talking.
• But November is too early. I also needed to have a pig slaughtered... (thus) I situated the abbey in the mountains.
• The narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.
• Imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
• I realized that it was taking on an opera-buffa structure, with long recitatives and elaborate arias.
• In doubling Adso I was once more doubling the series of interstices, of screens, set between me as a biographical personality.. (It) recalled to me .. certain childish games in which I pretended I was in a submarine under the blankets and from it sent messages to my sister, under the blankets of the next bed, both of us cut off from the outside world and perfectly free to travel like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
• I realized afterward that I was trying to follow with my fingers the rhythm of Adso's lovemaking, and therefore I could not pause to select the most cogent quotation.
• (A difference) lies between the text that seeks to produce a new reader and the text that tries to fulfill the wishes of the readers already to be found in the street.
• (The writer) wants to reveal the reader to himself.
• He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.".. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past,.. both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony.

__ "It's hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride."
__ "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is here, then, between God and primigenial chaos?"

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