Tuesday, October 18, 2005

A Polyphony of Fictions

Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collission of two ideas--both false--can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolous in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

--Casaubon, in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. (The name of the character, by the way, is very fitting, given that Eco's Casaubon, like Eliot's, gets tangled up in a Key to All Mythologies.)