Umberto Eco

And so I was left with a number of manuscript notebooks in my hand, and a great emptiness in my heart.

n.

“If what you saw has anything in common with the Masons, it’s the fact that Bramanti’s rite is also a pastime for provincial politicians and professional men. It was thus from the beginning: Freemasonry was a weak exploitation of the Templar legend. And this is the caricature of a caricature. Except that those gentlemen take it extremely seriously. Alas! The world is teeming with Rosicrucians and Templars like the ones you saw this evening. You mustn’t expect any revelation from them, though among their number occasionally you can come across an initiate worthy of trust.”

You see, my son, everyone is accustomed to saying that the human community is based on three forces: warriors, monks, and peasants, and this may have been true until yesterday. But we live in new times, in which the man of learning is becoming equally important, even if he is not a monk but a man who studies law, philosophy, the movement of the stars, and many other things, and who doesn't always give an account of what he is doing to his bishop or to his king.

Moreover, the genre of “statement of poetics” is one that is authorized by a venerable tradition.

Above all, literature keeps language alive as our collective heritage.

By helping to create language,

literature creates a sense of identity and community. I spoke initially of Dante, but we might also think of what Greek civilization would have been like without Homer, German identity without Luther’s translation of the Bible, the Russian language without Pushkin, or Indian civilization without its foundation epics.

nor am I idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or

etting fire to a child—whoever these people are—turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer “new-speak” (they don’t even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books.

This is not true. Literary works encourage freedom of interpretation, because they offer us a discourse that has many layers of reading and place before us the ambiguities of language and of real life. But in order to play this game, which allows every generation to read literary works in a different way, we must be moved by a profound respect for what I have called elsewhere the intention of the text.