Monday, December 3, 2007
On seeing
Posted by Zach in News

I’ve been reading Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. The protagonist, Yambo, is a book collector who lost a portion of his memory in an accident. Information that exists on a purely factual plane is retrievable (knowledge of Napoleon’s birthday), but personal information (knowledge of his wife’s birthday–or for that matter, knowledge of his wife) is gone. At any rate, words remain, and he rediscovers his life by reading the books of his life, particularly the books of his childhood.

I wonder if Eco was inspired by the chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” in Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy. Chesterton writes:

“We have all read in scientific books, and indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.”

The great re-learning Yambo undertakes is facilitated through books. This is to me the most worthy part of Eco’s novel–the assumption that literature provides us a gateway to fresh discovery, even of the mundane.

The deepest response that literature can provoke is a response of gratitude–not of the literature itself, but of life. Through our constant contact, we expect the human experience to be as dull and worn as an antique coin, but occasionally authors like Jane Austen or Thornton Wilder toss us the coin and we find it newly minted. This I think is what Chesterton means when he famously wrote, “These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

The best part of the imagination is that it helps us see with our brain, what we once saw with our eyes.

One Response to “On seeing”

Joy comments:
Sunday, December 9th, 2007

lovely. thank you for reminding me why I love literature. and art. and all beauty

Leave a Comment.