I finished reading Eco’s Serendipities: Language and Lunacy today (a big thank you to Cliff, who bought it for me from my wishlist). It follows on from Eco’s earlier work, The Search for the Perfect Language. Central themes from Baudolino and Foucault’s Pendulum are among those explored in this stimulating series of essays.

Eco observes the manner in which certain intellectual errors and mistaken beliefs have left their mark upon history. Here we find the Donation of Constantine, Prester John, the Rosicrucians and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The interesting side-effects of errors make for thought-provoking reading. For those accustomed to seeing history as a series of broad thoroughfares, the experience of being escorted by Eco down some of history’s cul-de-sacs, dingy alleyways and derelict streets is an eye-opening one.

Eco concludes his first chapter by speaking of the need for each generation to keep their minds open to the possibility that certain of our most familiar ideas (he takes the idea of the ‘universe’ as an example) may have been illusions and challenges us to always be prepared to ‘rewrite the encyclopedia’.

Eco devotes most of the book to chronicling some of the theories about the Edenic language and the manner in which this related to the post-Babelic languages and certain of the attempts made to construct perfect languages and more modern attempts to explain the origin of language and the preservation of meaning within it.

Eco also draws his reader’s attention to the manner in which a number of thinkers imposed preconceived conclusions upon the evidence that they encountered in their different fields and activities and failed to appreciate the manner in which the evidence actually undermine their familiar categories. For example, Marco Polo discovered the unicorn, but also discovered that it was black rather than white, had hooves like those of an elephant and a pelt like that of a buffalo. He was only able to speak of the unknown in terms of what he had expected to find. ‘He was a victim of his background books.’ It seems to me that this is a mistake that we have all made at some time or other. I am tempted to make a remark about certain theological debates at this point.

[I resisted]