Umberto Eco, he of inter alia The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, Travels in Hyper-Reality and How to Travel with a Salmon, is curating an exhibition of lists at the Louvre in Paris. What a splendid notion from a simply splendid person, a real-life, honest-to-goodness intellectual in a time of mental dwarves.
Lists, he says, are the way humans construct order out of chaos. It is the way they make sense of a perplexing world and a method of understanding the inexplicability of life and other humans.
I may be paraphrasing him a bit, just a smidgeon, but this would be my humble understanding of the great man’s thinking here. I cannot vouch for his thoughts on the missionary position, one-ply versus two-ply toilet paper (though any sane person would be able to deduce that with some clarity), David Icke’s sanity, or whether the moon ever feels lonely, but of this I am sure. Certainly lists are vitally important. They are tools without which we are unable to make our way in the world. Indeed, not to murder other people it is necessary daily to draw up a list of reasons not to, not least of which would be lists of ways of getting rid of all the bodies, which is really rather tricky when you think about it. I have spent some time cogitating on same, and making lists which are promptly destroyed lest they fall into the hands of people who will fail to understand the true context and spirit in which they were made and report me to the authorities. So I have found that I cannot, for instance and strictly in context you understand, bury them in our garden – it’s too small for the number of victims, and our dog will dig them up. And I daresay there’s nothing quite as off-putting as relaxing with a nice cold beer of an evening only to find your quadruped best friend entering the house with someone’s foot in her mouth.
As the electricity has just gone off (again) and the UPS is beeping at me while I hurriedly finish typing this, gnashing my teeth, I try to find the silver lining in this situation (it’s cheaper than taking Prozac).
(Ehm… er… ah… This may take quite a long time.)
Oh yes, having a bookshop means never having to say: ‘Rats, I forgot to bring a book to work,’ when the power goes out.
