Umberto Eco is my comfort food. I hold him in a kind of ‘do no wrong’ place in my head that, were I being honest, no person should actually hold. He shares that space with a few others, but I can promise it is not too cramped in there. Frankly, I would happily read Eco’s grocery list if it was made available.
I picked this up in English. I tend to troll use bookstore and read what I can find, without being too picky. I also picked this up from the title alone. I never read anything by Zygmunt Bauman (the title of this Eco collection takes its name from the Italian translation of one of Bauman’s books), though his was a name dropped frequently during my master’s degree. I am, slowly, trying to get away from that part of my life, and so I have resigned myself to likely never reading Bauman. But I was hoping this would be a close approximation.
Nope. It wasn’t. Chronicles is a collection of the short pieces Eco wrote for the Italian magazine ‘L’espresso’ towards the end of his life. If you are familiar with Eco’s pop writing, there will be no surprise here. It is his style, and his humor, typically so.
There is something rather cute about going through this collection. Eco was old before he wrote these pieces, and its actually rather funny to think about an elderly Eco discussing some of these topics. One piece has Eco discovering the absolute breadth of internet pornography, and his comparing the 9 million hits ‘religion’ gives him on his search engine vs the 130 million ‘porn’ gives him. He then proceeds to meditate on MILF’s specifically, and notes how absurd the notion would have been to Proust. He also has thoughts on Twitter, Cell Phones, and Mass Media, and despite this being a person who lived through Italian fascism, he approaches each of these topics with surprising warmth and intelligence.
The Collection is not ‘Boomer finds the internet’, but the spirit is there. It isn’t so much about the post-modern society (I assume) Bauman spoke about, but us observing Eco discovering the new world through his unique world view. During my Master’s, all of my professors had met the elderly Eco, and made jokes about what he had been reduced to in his final years (the jokes were a bit cruel, and I won’t repeat them). But while this collection comes from the same time period, Eco seems more than lucid in his writing here.
I referred to this as ‘comfort food’ when I opened. I think I can be more specific. Reading this, I realized just how influential Eco was on my life. Eco was one of the last polymaths, a relic of the last century that is, at least in my opinion, no longer even possible. This is very much what I always wanted to be in life – so eminently knowledgeable on everything that all my opinions would be both informed and valuable. That’s the dream. I dream of Eco.
Failures in Polymathy 