Books, Arts & Manners: Welcome to the Eco Chamber

Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver (Harcourt, Brace, 641 pp., $22.95)

Atop Montsegur, south of Toulouse near the Spanish border, light and shadow, just at midsummer noon, divide—precisely, diagonally—the threshold of a huge white stone ruin. The angles of its plan point to the direction of sunrise on each of the 12 days when Helios enters a new sign. The first rays of midsummer dawn enter a small room by eastern slits, exit by aligned western ones, grazing no stone. All the building-stone to construct such an intricacy got hauled up that mountain; but by whom, and why? Well, people called “Cathars” took refuge there from “the crusade against the Albigensians.” That crusade ended in 1244 when two hundred of them were extracted by siege and burned. What cult they’d cherished nobody knows for sure.

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Hugh Kenner

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Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver (Harcourt, Brace, 641 pp., $22.95)

Atop Montsegur, south of Toulouse near the Spanish border, light and shadow, just at midsummer noon, divide—precisely, diagonally—the threshold of a huge white stone ruin. The angles of its plan point to the direction of sunrise on each of the 12 days when Helios enters a new sign. The first rays of midsummer dawn enter a small room by eastern slits, exit by aligned western ones, grazing no stone. All the building-stone to construct such an intricacy got hauled up that mountain; but by whom, and why? Well, people called “Cathars” took refuge there from “the crusade against the Albigensians.” That crusade ended in 1244 when two hundred of them were extracted by siege and burned. What cult they’d cherished nobody knows for sure.