avrelia

I find it mildly disturbing that I was full of really cool ideas about Eco and the book when I was reading it two months ago, and I even typed some of it, and then I accidentally deleted it, and then I didn’t have time and/or inspiration to write it again, and now that I have I cannot remember anything. Anything but vague memories of how happy I was thinking those thoughts. I have too many books right to read from the library, so going back isn’t an option, and it wouldn’t be the same anyway, and I really wanted to post those thoughts here, and… woe me.

Let’s try, anyway.

It wasn’t an easy book to read, neither the first time around, five years ago, when it took me couple of months to finish it, nor now, even though I read it in a week. I cannot claim I got all the references, and understood fully everything… It is never the point, isn’t it? We are reading books through our personal lens that change as we change. Five years ago a different me read a different “Foucault's Pendulum”. The one I read now was about history, perceptions, and personal choices – the things that have a large place in my thoughts lately. (If my husband reread this book now, it would probably be about competition and productivity.)
We want to make sense out the world, out of the life, and of the history – our personal and the big one. We want everything to make sense. Sometimes by this we mean to have a sense of higher purpose.

I love reading about The Plan. I don’t suppose it existed, but I enjoy reading the chapters about creating the plan as well as various conspiracy theories. They often seem so entertaining. In this I am a little bit like Kazobon – trying to fanwank history for the fun of it, but not believing in any of it, just enamored with the beauty of a well-crafted nonsense.

It is a little bit about being a demiurge - creating your own world out of the chaos of the real one. Only it is not a chaos, it is a life, going through its eternal conflict between chaos and order, because both perfect chaos and perfect order is an absence of life. Entropy. It is also about creation itself – paralleling the creation of the plan, with writing of a book, with conceiving of a child, with creation of oneself. And once again, does our life have a meaning? Is there a one perfect, sparkling moment that justifies everything, that brings everything to the single point, the only fixed point in the universe?

So, here goes a mistake of getting heads too high it the abstract intellectual clouds. And Belbo is telling about the plan to a wrong person for a wrong reason.

I was thinking about it for too long, and I am losing the connection with the book. What was about Belbo? It was important. I’ll have to read it again. Meet me here in five years, ok?

( I had fun, too. )

Welcome back, Writercon ladies!