Foucault's Pendulum

I can now truthfully claim to have read Foucault's Pendulum in its entirety.  This is no small feat, if the three false starts I suffered over the span of more than a decade are any indication.

About it I can say this: it expends over 500 pages of extremely dense, erudite esotericism for the purpose of staging a final moment that is poignantly depressing and quite possibly meaningless.

Also, the protagonist is not really the protagonist, but that hardly matters since the story is not really the point of the story (if there even is a point).

Something else of which I'm unsure is whether the good Dr. Eco is entirely aware of the irony of employing an impenetrably abstruse style of writing to deliver an indictment of impenetrably abstruse ideology.  I sincerely hope that he is, as that at least would lend a playfully sardonic aftertaste to the endeavor.  Otherwise, it's the pot calling the kettle black, since just about the only people capable of consuming the book without suffering the literary equivalent of compressive asphyxia are the handful of elite, linguaphile pedants roaming the halls of prestigious academic institutions, in whose company alone Eco no doubt considers himself among peers.

Quotations

• What a relief! Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget. (page 23)
• I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. (page 43)
• …he who embarks on the creation of worlds is already tainted with corruption and evil. (page 49)
• There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. (page 54)
• I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely. (page 67)
• How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to the Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic? (page 77)
• But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. (page 81)
• The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come. (page 150)
• The world is monotonous, men learn nothing, and, with every generation, they fall into the same errors and nightmares, events are not repeated but they resemble one another… novelties end, surprises, revelations.  I can confess to you now that only the Red Sea is listening to us: my immortality bores me.  Earth holds no more secrets for me and I have no hope anymore in my fellows. (page 152)
• You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. (page 195)
• He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own.  He can always find one on loan. (page 196)
• Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it.  …  That's why the Pendulum disturbs me.  It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. (page 201)
• Mankind can't endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway.  So a cosmic plot has to be found - God, angels, devils. (page 266)
• In the wretched modern world at its birth, the nobles need a place where they can come into contact with the new producers of capital, and the new producers of capital are looking to be ennobled. (page 356)
• Now, in the pale lights of the moon that seeps through the half-open door, you stand erect, more beautiful than the serpent that seduced Adam, haughty and lascivious, virgin and prostitute, clad only in your carnal power, because a naked woman is an armed woman. (page 414)