Saturday photo

 by PAM

"I felt confused, afraid of my own thoughts." (Adso of Melk)



Yeah, it's that time of year... when it's possible to have those lazy days, savor being woken up in the morning by the cheerful chirping of the birds as the warm fingers of the sun touch your face gently on the bed rather than being summoned from your slumber by the irritating sound of that "bossy" alarm clock before the break of dawn.  It's that time of year when it is possible to enjoy sipping warm coffee and biting into those nicely prepared pan de sal sandwiches or eating that traditional Filipino breakfast of fried rice, egg and longganisa with slices of fresh tomato and grilled eggplant in an unhurried start of the day.  Yes, it's summer break in this part of the world! 

While there are still a few big deadlines scattered in the calendar for the next two months, at least, those can be worked on without too much 'gear-shifting' and 'sprinting'.  Besides, those are 'my kind of deadlines'... unraveling 'mysteries' that kept taunting and luring my students and I in the lab last semester.  Unraveling the clues is like swimming in that sparkling sea of exciting new things, refreshing the mind and the soul as the
A Rose of an obra... "Temptations,
to be sure; intellectual pride."
(Adso of Melk)knots of the mysteries are slowly figured out.  These are far more enjoyable than laboring over voluminous test papers and lab reports a month ago... without pause, and in a big hurry, too, that contemplation becomes an unaffordable luxury with the little time given us!  Ah, what a torture... especially for faithful Academics who view contemplation as a vital part of spiritual sustenance at work.  And it was supposed to be an exciting culmination of a semester's worth of hardwork!  Therefore, these summer days are those when work can be truly enjoyable... and the reasonable space of time between deadlines now affords us to hope for a satisfying finish.  

As for contemplative relaxation these summer days, for the past how many nights, I have been re-reading Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" - on worn out paperback... for the fifth time!  Yet, I still drool over the obvious brilliance with which Professor Eco knitted his remarkable thoughts, his wacky sense of humor, and incredible imagination into an impressive tapestry of fictional phenomenon - this book - that is both timeless and boundless.  A mystery about a series of deaths in an ancient abbey in the Alps of Italy, set in the Middle Ages when the Roman Catholic Church was underfire, the novel put together catholicism, philosophy, politics and greed, and the twisted passion of conservatism, fundamentalism and extremism with the purest intentions to pursue the holy life of a faithful, in a truly delicious blend of intellectual discourse that relentlessly challenged the reader to get thoroughly involved in processing Prof. Eco's thick slices of radical propositions as the mystery unraveled achingly.  The last couple of times that I re-read this novel, while the narration went on the same route, it seemed to reveal new things to me each time. It felt like, each time I revisited, Prof. Eco kept expressing new opinions on ideas unveiled by different authors and philosophers in their own writings... when, in fact, it was I who didn't have the necessary breadth of experience and learnings to put the remarkable depth of Prof. Eco's abysmal profundity within my intellectual reach each time.  Of course, I may not be able to reach that depth at all either... no matter how hard I tried!  Oh, well....

Now, on my fifth time to follow Prof. Eco's narration, I am discovering yet a slew of new things.  The symbolisms seemed like mysterious corners in his narrative path or a vast land sprawled in front of me... and the more I experience new things in my own life, more mysteries are revealed to me in his narration that I didn't realize were there before, the more I recognize the wisdom (or anti-wisdom) behind his propositions... and suppositions!  This is why, I never thought re-reading it is a waste of time.  At the same time, I don't think it is possible to review "The Name of the Rose" in a way that would make equal sense to its readers.  It's one of those novels that need to be "experienced" by the reader... and the readers' reactions to the experience of reading this particular book may vary, depending on how closely their own life's path paralleled Prof. Eco's narrative route, or how willing they are to open their minds to seemingly radical ideas, which when closely scrutinized may prove to be not as far detached from the truth as one might imagine in the beginning... or completely tangent from the truth, in some cases!  The challenge is recognizing whether Prof. Eco is trying to humor you with your own joke, or trapping you to evaluate your thoughts on age-old beliefs that you accepted without question.  

"The abbey where I was staying was probably the last to boast of excellence in the production and reproduction of learning.  But perhaps, for this very reason, the monks were no longer content with the holy work of copying; they wanted also to produce new complements of nature, impelled by the lust for novelty.  And they did not realize, as I sensed vaguely at that moment (and know clearly today, now aged in years and experience), that in doing so they sanctioned the destruction of their excellence.  Because if this new learning they wanted to produce were to circulate freely outside those walls, then nothing would distinguish that sacred place any longer from cathedral school or a city university.  Remaining isolated, on the other hand, it maintained its prestige and its strength intact, it was not corrupted by disputation, by the quodlibetical conceit that would subject every mystery and every greatness to the scrutiny of the sic et non.  There, I said to myself, are the reasons for the silence and the darkness that surround the library: it is the preserve of learning but can maintan this learning unsullied only if it prevents its reaching anyone at all, even the monks themselves."
-Adso of Melk

At the end of it all, after being awed by the spectacular intellectual fireworks... and the incredibly compeling invitation to stray... like before, I arrived in the same place:  a strengthened faith in God, and the resolve to keep embracing catholicism, regardless of imperfections - real or perceived!  I hope that that wouldn't disappoint Prof. Eco too much though. ;)  In any case, I always appreciate this novel of his as a reminder that faith and its foundations should not be taken for granted, and that its sustenance should not be left to traditions alone, especially in this era of "knowledge explosion" in the confusing midst of the digital age... and I can't wait to read Prof. Eco's "The Prague Cemetery", too. 

In the meantime, it's weekend... there's more time to be lazy.  Let's see... maybe re-reading Vincent van Gogh's biography could be worthwhile, too?  I suspect it is!  Ah, summer days, you are so welcome!  Stay, please!

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