A friend called, asking me whether I had a particular book and, if yes, whether I could lend it to him.
That request landed me straight at the entrance to the dark forest (coincidence has it that I’ve just passed the middle of the journey of my life). Because with books, I limit my organisational skills to two piles: the read and the great unread. Raymond Chandler investigates the disappearance of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, misled by the false clues of a Rohinton Mistry, whose A Fine Balance is unfinely balanced on top of a pile of William Boyd hardbacks. David Sedaris chuckles at a morose Murakami and Dashiell Hammett tries to chat up Robert Galbraith, knowing, of course, that it’s just JK Rowling in disguise.
The second hurdle is that I strongly believe that, as the saying goes, when you lend a book, you might as well write it an epitaph. In fact, I have proof of that because the book that my friend asked about belonged, originally, to him. He lent it to me years ago and it got lost in the written passages of time.
And that left me with a conundrum. Was my friend genuinely asking me whether I had the book, or was he politely hinting that I had his book and could I please return it?
A two-hour rummage later, I hadn’t unearthed my friend’s request. What I did find, however, was an old copy of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. And having nothing better to do (you never have anything better to do than read a book), I gave it a second reading. And it was just like the first: a joyful skipping by the moonlight of semiotics, biblical and medieval studies, literary theory and detective fiction.
True, there are long passages of pleasurable (for them) disputation between William of Baskerville and Abo the abbot. But take a short cut at your peril because, a chapter later, you find that you’ll have to walk your eyes back to an unread passage to be able to continue your journey.
Google it and you’ll find one thousand and one interpretations of Eco’s debut novel. But for me, this 579-page opus can be summarised in one simple sentence: the labyrinth you must cross in order to indulge in the joy of knowledge.
And that, as Marc Kosciejew writes in his cover story, is nowadays more apt than ever before because, with the information overload that we constantly suffer, the path to knowledge has become the most travelled.
As we approach the age of the zettabyte, we cannot but feel overwhelmed. But there is a conundrum: does more information make us more knowledgeable, or does it push us to skim the surface and learn less about more? After all, does it matter if a search generates thousands of pages, when all you need is one reliable primary source?
It’s like with social media – having one thousand friends doesn’t necessarily make you popular. The clue is in Eco’s library.
techeditor@timesofmalta.com