Free Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco umberto foucault Page B

clarinet."
    "I got the clarinet," he
concluded sharply, "but I never played it."
    "Never played it? Or
never dreamed it?"
    "Played it," he said,
underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a
fool.

10
    And finally nothing is
cabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon which
numbers this Magia depends.
    ¡XCesare della Riviera,
Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp.
65-66
    But I was talking about
my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had
exchanged a few words at Pilade's, but I didn't know much about
him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious
publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the
university.
    "And what do you do?" he
asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end
of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used
the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the
familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at
Pilade's. "Tu¡Xbuy me a drink," a student wearing a parka would say
to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like
Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not
one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he
used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was
responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss
between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with
real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi,
one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he
respected but hadn't known long. He addressed me formally the whole
time we worked together, and I valued that.
    "And what do you do?" he
asked, with what I now know was friendliness.
    "In real life or in this
theater?" I said, nodding at our surroundings.
    "In real
life."
    "I study."
    "You mean you go to the
university, or you study?"
    "You may not believe
this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I'm finishing a
thesis on the Templars."
    "What an awful subject,"
he said. "I thought that was for lunatics."
    "No. I'm studying the
real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the
Templars, anyway?"
    "I work for a publishing
company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while
an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings
up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic."
    "Don't I know! Their
name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How
do you identify the others?"
    "I'll explain. By the
way, what's your name?"
    "Casaubon."
    "Casaubon. Wasn't he a
character in Middlemarch?"
    "I don't know. There was
also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we're not
related."
    "The next round's on me.
Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people
in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."
    "And that covers
everybody?"
    "Oh, yes, including us.
Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of
these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a
moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of
these components, these four ideal types."
    "Idealtypen."
    "Very good. You know
German?"
    "Enough for
bibliographies."
    "When I was in school,
if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life
knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with
Chinese."
    "My German's poor, so
I'll graduate. But let's get back to your typology. What about
geniuses? Einstein, for example?"
    "A genius uses one
component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others." He took a
sip of his drink. "Hi there, beautiful," he said. "Made that
suicide attempt yet?"
    "No," the girl answered
as she walked by. "I'm in a collective now."
    "Good for you," Belbo
said. He turned back to me. "Of course, there's no reason one can't
have collective suicides, too."
    "Getting back to the
lunatics."
    "Look, don't take me too
literally. I'm not trying to put the universe in