Umberto Eco at a Press Conference of Bozar (Creative Commons Photo by Erinc Salor at Flickr)
Over at Der Spiegel, there’s a great interview with Umberto Eco. Apparently, that’s not a brand of beachwear, but a person. He is also a polymath, which sounds very impressive. Obviously, I’m wholly ignorant of his work.
I share the following because (1) it’s about the human fascination with lists, and (2) it has the best article title I’ve read in a while: We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die.
He explains his new exhibition at The Louvre.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right. (Eco)
The whole thing may be a triviality, but I’m a listmaker, so it’s sort of interesting. I never head to Costco without a shopping list and can’t manage my job without a task list. Even when it’s messy, folded up, and stepped on, lists are my necessity.
The Baroque era was an age of lists. Suddenly, all the scholastic definitions that had been made in the previous era were no longer valid. People tried to see the world from a different perspective. Galileo described new details about the moon. And, in art, established definitions were literally destroyed, and the range of subjects was tremendously expanded. For instance, I see the paintings of the Dutch Baroque as lists: the still lifes with all those fruits and the images of opulent cabinets of curiosities. Lists can be anarchistic. (Eco)
Okay, that’s overly dramatic, but you get his point.
In youth, I wrote lists and concept maps made out of post-it notes. And it was about every damn fool thing in my mind. Even when it was pseudoscientific garbage, the list was the one constant. As my understanding drunkenly lumbered forward, so did the scribbles. I just have to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand…
