Listening to beautiful words read aloud before bed is one of my greatest pleasures. The brilliant Umberto Ecco heaps delight upon delight. Here is a taste of last night's bedtime story, masterfully rendered into English by William Weaver.
Cogito Interruptus
Some books are easier to review, to explain, or comment on aloud, than they are simply to read; because it is only by applying yourself to a gloss that you can follow their argumentation without distraction, their implacable syllogistic necessities, or the precise knots of relation. This is why books like the Metaphysics of Aristotle or the Critique of Pure Reason have more commentators than readers, more specialists than admirers.
And there are, on the other hand, books that are extremely pleasant to read, but impossible to write about; because the minute you start expounding them or commenting on them, you realize that they refuse to be translated into the proposition "This book says that." The person who reads them for pleasure realizes he has spent his money well; but anyone who reads them in order to tell others about them becomes furious at every line, tears up the notes he took a moment before, seeks the conclusion that comes after his "therefore," and cannot find it.
Clearly it would be an unforgivable sin of ethnocentrism to consider "not thought out" a Zen tale that follows ideals of logic different from those to which we are accustomed; but it is also certain that if our ideal of reasoning is summed up in a certain Western model, consisting of "whereas" and "inasmuch as," then in these unreviewable books we find illustrious examples of cogito interruptus whose mechanism we must bear in mind. Since cogito interruptus is common both to the insane and to the authors of a reasoned "illogic," we must understand when it is a defect and when a virtue, and (against all Malthusian custom) a fertilizing virtue, what's more.
Cogito interruptus is typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols or symptoms. Like someone who, for example, points to the little box of matches, stares hard into your eyes, and says, "You see, there are seven...," then gives you a meaningful look, waiting for you to perceive the meaning concealed in that unmistakable sign; or like the inhabitant of a symbolic universe, where every object and every even translates into sign something hyper-Uranian that everyone already knows but wants only to see reconfirmed.
Cogito interruptus is also typical of those who see the world inhabited not by symbols but by symptoms: indubitable signs of something that is neither here below nor up above, but that sooner or later will happen.
The reviewer's torment lies in the fact that when a person stares at him and says, "You see, there are seven matches," the reviewer is already helpless to explain to others the scope of the sign or symptom; but then when the same person adds, "And consider also, if you want to dispel any doubt, that four swallows flew past today," then the reviewer is really lost. None of this means that cogito interruptus is not a great prophetic, poetic, psychological technique. Only that it is ineffable.
