Its hero, an antiquarian book dealer named Yambo, suffers a stroke at the novel's beginning and loses what neurologists called "episodic" memory, which is the memory of our day-to-day life. However, he remembers everything he has ever read.

...

To a man like Eco, it's far better to retain what you've read than the memory of where you went for your vacation last year, if you have to make a choice.

"Take the case of a person who's totally illiterate," Eco says. "When he or she dies, his or her life has spanned 60 or 70 years, let's say. But you or me, when we die we've had a life 2,000 years long. Our life contains — I don't know, the assassination of Caesar and the discovery of America. People who have had cultural training have a longer life than the person who has only personal biography."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 7:30 PM  |