On reading Eco

I will be reading Eco’s Serendipity today. I had not imagined I would: In Search of Perfect Language had once depressed me so that I had sworn off the man. Not through the fault of Eco, though his style does suffer from some stain of the Italian (and more generally, continental) disease (verbosity); but not in amounts which would make him unreadable. Rather, the book was made unpalatable through the fault of the men who made up its topic.

I had always known, of course, that throughout history men have wasted inordinate amount of time on, and have boggled each other's minds with, utterly stupid, wasteful speculation; but to know about the existence of a horror is one thing; and to be faced with it is another. The chapter on Athanasius Kirchner's pseudo-decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics (which was no such thing) in twelve bloody volumes made me weep: at the tremendous amount of time and energy wasted on production of that pompous preposterous piece of nonsense by the man; and on its reading by countless others; and worse, the amount of emotional capital invested in the “work” by the author; and the incredible social esteem earned by it. ("Father Athanasius is a great, wise man", they said about the Collegium Romanum: "he writes thick books which no one can understand").

Unlike Perfect Language, Serendipity carries a health warning: it is subtitled Language and Lunacy. I have been warned; armed with it, I will know how to approach the topic; I should be alright then.