har-ish

What started with the accidental tumbling of The Name of the Rose on an eventful rainy Saturday in 2008 became a lifelong fascination with Umberto Eco and his strange, magnificent universe of books, memory, signs and mysteries. This doodle is my small homage to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: A world where fragments of memory float around, refusing to settle into anything quite whole. Perhaps that’s what I like about Eco: he makes the act of remembering feel like an archaeological excavation.

And then there was Baudolino, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Prague Cemetery, Numero Zero. Each book taking me somewhere I hadn’t quite known existed. I was thrilled, intrigued, occasionally chased into sadness, struck by epiphanies, made to feel gloriously dumb, and repeatedly excited by the possibility of drinking from that enormous pool of erudition. I read Eco at different ages and through different versions of myself: when I was happily single, when I was intoxicated with love, when distance from my love made me sad, and when that love eventually broke. The books changed meaning because I had changed; sometimes I understood them differently, sometimes I probably understood very little at all. But Eco remained a silent but staunch presence through all of it; a constant companion who never demanded my attention, yet was always there when I returned. Perhaps that is what a lifelong fascination really is: not something that stays unchanged, but something that keeps revealing a different face as you change.