quare id faciam?

An excerpt

I asked Paola what my political leanings were. 'I don't want to find out I was a Nazi or something.'
    'You're what they call a good liberal,' Paola said, 'but more from instinct than ideology. I always used to say politics bored you – and for the sake of argument you called me La Pasionaria. It was as if you sought refuge in your antique books out of fear, or contempt for the world. No, that's not fair, it wasn't contempt, because you were fervent about the great moral issues. You signed pacifist and nonviolent petitions, you were outraged by racism. You even joined an antivivisection league.'
    'Animal vivisection, I imagine.'
    'Of course. Human vivisection is called war.'
    'And was I ... always like that, even before meeting you?'
    'You skated over your childhood and adolescence. And anyway I've never really been able to understand you about these things. You've always been a mix of compassion and cynicism. If there was a death sentence somewhere, you'd sign the petition, you'd send money to a drug rehab community. But if someone told you, say, that ten thousand babies had died in a tribal war in central Africa, you'd shrug, as if to say that the world was badly made and there's nothing to be done. You were always a jovial man, you liked good-looking women, good wine, and good music, but I always got the impression that all that was a shield, a way of hiding yourself. When you dropped it, you used to say that history is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.'
    'Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.'
    'Who said that?'
    'I don't remember.'
    'It must be something that involved you. But you always bent over backwards if anyone needed anything – when they had the flood in Florence, you went as a volunteer to help pull books out of the mud at the Biblioteca Nazionale. That must be it, you were compassionate about the little things and cynical about the big things.'
    'That sounds fair. One does what one can. The rest is God's fault, as Gragnola used to say.'
    'Who is Gragnola?'
    'I don't remember that either.'

 
From The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco 2004, chap. 4. (The most recent of audio titles I've had playing in the truck.) The novel's principal character is an antiquarian bookseller who's lost all memory of identity & personal connections – but almost none of books & their contents.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:05 AM