Lots of intriguing stuff here. I'm a bit of on Eco fan; he does semiotics in a way I enjoy. Here's an interview related to his latest book The Vertigo of Lists.
SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. What attracted my attention particularly was this: "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."
This is one of the things I've been wrestling with in the theological reflection on language and culture based in Adam's naming the animals. It felt validating to see Eco saying something pretty much on the same wavelength.
"Spend and tax" not "tax and spend"
I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...
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"'Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell yo...
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from: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/online/2012/5/22/1337672561216/Annular-solar-eclipse--008.jpg -
I'm not sure people have believed me when I've said that there have been discovered uncaffeinated coffee beans. Well, here's one...
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A couple of years ago there was a TV series called "The human footprint", which was a kind of list of the effects human beings have on the planet -- how many cubic feet of farts one emits in a lifetime and so on.
One item intrigued me -- the average Brit knows 1750 people in their lifetime. I decided to make a list of all the people I knew, and what I remembered about them. I'm at about number 750 now. The dead live on in the memory of the living, but when I am dead, who will remember those. Is that why at funerals we sing "Memory eternal"?
I remember the human footprint. I wanted to get clips to use in alternative worship.
The memory thing is intriguing, isn't it? A couple of years back I saw a play at the Edinburgh Festival which postulated for its exploration of the human condition an afterlife where people live on as long as they are in the memory of the living. When the last person that remembered them dies, they fade from that afterlife (but did they then go to another afterlife while the recently dead remembered them -and so on?). It's an interesting thought because it takes seriously the idea that we are because others are (a bit like ubuntu). I tend to respond to your question about who will remember with the answer 'God' -whose remembrance is sustaining and (re)creative...
Reminds me of the Berkeleyan limerick:
Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd
I am always about it the quad
and that's why this tree
continues to be
since observed by, yours faithfully, God.
Someone responded to a blog posting I made on the topic by recalling a nun who had made a list of everyone she had ever met, however briefly, and prayed for them regularly. I rather liked that.
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