Obama, Barack. Dreams From My Father. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. 211-212.
“Do you ever hear from her?”
“I got a postcard at Christmas. She’s happy now; she’s met someone. And I have my work.”
“Is that enough?”
“Sometimes.”
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Obama, Barack. Dreams From My Father. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. 127.
What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment. She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance.
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Habermas, Jürgen. “Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State?” Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. Ed. Florian Schuller. Trans. Brian McNeil. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006. 50-51.
For the citizen who is “unmusical” in religious matters, this entails the demand—which is not in the least trivial—that he identify self-critically the relationship between faith and knowledge, on the basis of what all the world knows. This is because the expectation that there will be continuing disagreement between faith and knowledge deserves to be called “rational” only when secular knowledge, too, grants that religious convictions have an epistemological status that is not purely and simply irrational. And this is why, in the public political arena, naturalistic world views, which owe their genesis to a speculative assimilation of scientific information and are relevant to the ethical self-understanding of the citizens, do not in the least enjoy a prima facie advantage over competing world views or religious understandings.
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Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. 247.
And instead, his indulgence actually made me worse. A psychologist once explained to me that the worst thing a therapist can do to an extremely depressed patient is be nice. Because that kindness creates a stasis, allows the depressive to remain comfortable in her current miserable state. In order for therapy to be effective, a patient must be prodded and provoked, forced into confrontations, given sufficient incentive to push herself out of the caged fog of depression. Rafe was probably too nice to me. He allowed me to feel bad and that, in turn, allowed me to feel even worse. All I ever did with Rafe was wallow in my pain.
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Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. 246.
And then Rafe came along, and he tried to love me, I really believe he did, but there was no amount of love that would have stitched my wounded psyche at that point. In fact, compared to all the other forces at work in the world, love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion—assuming it was even real—hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grew up in an era of divorce are—in response to some atavistic instinct—still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small. As Leonard Cohen once wrote, “Love is not a victory march / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” I discovered, through the love Rafe gave me, that affection as medicine is highly overrated, that a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone’s love. It is just so much worse than that.
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Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984. 522-523.
It may be when he writes the author has a certain empirical audience in mind; this is how the founders of the modern novel wrote−Richardson, Fielding, Defoe−who were writing for merchants and their wives. But Joyce, too, is writing for an audience, imagining an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia. In both cases, whether the writer believes he is writing for a public standing there, money in hand, just outside the door, or whether he means to write for a reaser still to come, writing means constructing, through the text, one’s own model reader.
What does it mean, to imagine a reader able to overcome the penitential obstacle of the firsr hundred pages? It means, precisely, writing one hundred pages for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterward.
Is there a writer who writes only for posterity? No, not even if he says so himself, because, since he is not Nostradamus, he can conceive of posterity only on the model of what he knows of his contemporaries. Is there a writer who writes only for a handful of readers? Yes, if by this you mean that the model reader he imagines has slight chance of being made flesh in any number. But even this writer writes in the hope, not all that secret, that his book itself will create, and in great quantity, many new exemplars of this reader, desired and pursued with such craftsmanlike precision, and postulated, encouraged, by his text.
If there is a difference, it lies between the text that seeks to produce a new reader and the text that tries to fulfill the wishes of the readers already to be found in the street. In the latter case we have the book written, constructed, according to an effective, mass-production formula; the author carries out a kind of market analysis and adapts his work to its results. Even from a distance, it is clear that he is working by a formula; you have only to analyze the various novels he has written and you note that in all of them, after changing names, places, distinguishing features, he has told the same story−the one that the public was already asking of him.
But when a writer plans something new, and conceives a different kind of reader, he wants to be, not a market analyst, cataloguing expressed demands, but, rather, a philosopher, whos enses the patterns of the Zeitgeist. He wants to reveal to his public what it should want, even if it does not know it. He wants to reveal the reader to himself.
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Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984. 207.
“An acute reply, Adso. In fact, I have worked out this proposition: equal thinkness corresponds necessarily to equal power of vision. I have posited it because on other occaisions I have had individual insights of the same type. To be sure, anyone who tests the curative property of herbs knows that individual herbs of the same species have equal effects of the same nature on the patient, and therefore the investigator formulates the proposition that every herb of a given type helps the feverish, or that every lens of such a type magnifies the eye’s vision to the same degree. The science Bacon spoke of rests unquestionably on these prepositions. You understand, Adso, I must believe my preposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different.”
“And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know whay you act, but you don’t know why you know that you know what you do?”
I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. “Perhaps that’s it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it.”
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Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984. 155.
“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God,” I said, disheartened.
“Have you found any placed where God would have felt at home?” William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Then he sent me to rest. As I lay on my pallet, I concluded that my father should not have sent me out into the world, which was more complicated than I had thought. I was learning too many things.
“Salva me ab ore leonis [Save me out of the lion's mouth],” I prayed as I fell asleep.
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Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984. 153.
“You see? You yourself can no longer distinguish between one heretic and another. I at least have one rule. I know that heretics are those who endanger the order that sustains the people of God. And I defend the empire because it guarantees this order for me. I combat the Pope because he is handing the spiritual power over to the bishops of the cities, who are allied with the merchants and the corporations and will not be able to maintain this order. We have maintained it for centuries. And as for the heretics, I also have a rule, and it is summed up in the reply that Arnald Amalaricus, Bishop of Cîteaux, gave to those who asked him what to do with the citizens of Béziers: Kill them all, God will recognize His own.”
William lowered his eyes and remained silent for a while. Then he said, “The city of Béziers was captured and our forces had no regard for dignity of sex or age, and almost twenty thousand people were put to the sword. When the massacre was complete, the city was sacked and burned.”
“A holy war is nevertheless a war.”
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Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1984. 59-60.
“What does it matter? The Devil is stubborn, he follows a pattern in his snares and his seductions, he repeats his rituals at a distance of millennia, he is always the same, this is precisely why he is recognized as the enemy! I swear to you: They lighted candles on Easter night and took maidens into the cellar. Then they extinguished the candles and threw themselves on the maidens, even if they were bound to them by ties of blood. . . . And if from this conjunction a baby was born, the infernal rite was resumed, all around a little jar of wine, which they called the keg, and they became drunk and would cut the baby to pieces, and pour its blood into the goblet, and they threw babies on the fire, still alive, and they mixed the baby’s ashes and his blood, and drank!
“But Michael Psellus wrote this in his book on the workings of devils three hundred years ago! Who told you these things?”
“They did. Bentivenga and the others, and under torture!”
“There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him. . . . These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. Under torture Bentivenga may have told the most absurd lies, because it was no longer himself speaking, but his lost, the devils of his soul.”
“Lust?”
“Yes, there is lust for pain, as here is lust for adoration, and even a lust for humility. If it took so little to make the rebellious angels direct their ardor away from worship and humility toward pride and revolt, what can we expect of a human being? There, now you know: this was the thought that struck me in the course of my inquisitions. And this is why I gave up that activity. I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”
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