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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