"Or this apparatus for the study of the fermentation of wine. A maze of crystal arches leading from athanor to athanor, from alembic to alembic. Those little spectacles, the tiny hourglass, the electroscope, the lens. Or the laboratory knife that looks like a cuneiform character, the spatula with the release lever, the glass blade, and the tiny, three-centimeter clay crucible for making a gnome-sized homunculus--infinitesimal womb for the most minuscule clonings. Or the acajou boxes filled with little white packets like a village apothecary's cachets, wrapped in parchment, covered with untranslatable ciphers, with mineral specimens that in reality are fragments of the Holy Shroud of Basilides, reliquaries containing the foreskin of Hermes Trismegistus. Or the long, thin upholsterer's hammer, a gavel for opening a brief judgement day, an object of quintessences to be held among the Elfs of Avalon. Or the delightful little apparatus for analyzing the combustion of oil, and the glass globules arrayed like quatrefoil petals, with other quatrefoils connected by golden tubes, and quatrefoils attached to other, crystal, tubes leading first to a copper cylinder below it, then to other tubes, lower still, pendulous appendages, testicles, glands, goiters, crests...This is modern chemistry? For this the author had to be guillotined, though truly nothing is created or destroyed? Or was he killed to silence what his fraud revealed?
The Salle Lavoisier in the Conservatoire is actually a confession, a confession in code, and an emblem of the whole museum, for it mocks the arrogance of the Age of Reason and murmurs of other mysteries. Jacopo Belbo was reasonably right; Reason was wrong.
I had to hurry; time was pressing now. I walked past the meter, the kilogram, the other measures, all false guarantees. I had learned from Agliè that the secret of the pyramids is revealed if you don't calculate in meters, but in ancient cubits. Then, the counting machines that proclaimed the triumph of the quantitative but in truth pointed to the occult qualities of numbers, a return to the roots of the notarikon the rabbis carried with them as they fled through the plains of Europe. Astronomy and clocks and robots. Dangerous to linger among these new revelations. I was penetrating to the heart of a secret message in the form of a rationalist theatrum. But I had to hurry. Later, between closing time and midnight, I could explore them, objects that in the slanted light of sunset assumed their true aspect--symbols, not instruments."
https://books.google.com/books/about/Foucault_s_Pendulum.html?id=jbpsQD0khY0C
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyALEomuk9k
5 comments:
"It took them only an instant to cut off his head, but France may not produce another such head in a century."
~Joseph Louis Lagrange commenting on the beheading of Antoine Lavoisier by French revolutionaries in 1794.
The Physics Department at UW-Madison used to have a real Foucault Pendulum located in Sterling Hall (Yes, that Sterling Hall). I just learned today that it was removed with no real plans to rehang it.
" I just learned today that it was removed with no real plans to rehang it."
Regress!
Which is harder - building a full scale model of Foucault's pendulum with dirt and rocks or getting Pandora to feed to my computer through Bluetooth?
Answer is Pandora feed.
Fuck it.
We're getting, oh, so esoteric these days, aren't we?
TOP will be jealous.
I found the novel to be one of the wittiest and most amusing I've read. That said, Eco doesn't make his points and move on. He tiresomely makes his point at great length in such a way that one thinks he is saying one thing, when in fact he's saying something else entirely. Sarcasm developed to high art. Of course, I may be totally mislead by the translation.
I see Foucault's Pendulum as a proto-Dan Brown. Eco mines text for bogus interpretations to amuse, while Dan Brown mines art.
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