Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco umberto foucault Read Free Book Online

hairs.
Five, at this order of magnitude, won't help. If you say twenty-two
to the twenty-second power instead of twenty-seven to the
twenty-seventh, you still come up with something like three hundred
and forty billion billion billion. On the human scale, it doesn't
make much difference. If I counted one, two, three, and so on, one
number every second, it would take me almost thirty-two years to
get to one lousy little billion. And it's more complicated than
that, because cabala can't be reduced to the Sefer Yesirah alone.
Besides which, there's a good reason why any real permutation of
the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters. It's true that if
the last five letters fall in the middle of a word, they are
transformed into their normal variant. But not always. In Isaiah
9:2, for instance, there's the word "LMRBH," lemarbah¡Xwhich, note
the coincidence, means to multiply¡Xbut the mem in the middle is
written as a final mem."
    "Why is
that?"
    "Every letter
corresponds to a number. The normal mem is forty, but the final mem
is six hundred. This has nothing to do with temurah, which teaches
permutation; it involves, rather, gematria, which seeks sublime
affinities between words and their numeric values. With the final
mem the word "LMRBH" totals not two hundred and seventy-seven but
eight hundred and thirty-seven, and thus is equivalent to ThThZL,
or thath zal, which means ¡¥he who gives profusely.' So you can see
why all twenty-seven letters have to be considered: it isn't just
the sound that matters, but the number too. Which brings us to my
calculation. There are more than four hundred billion billion
billion billion possibilities. Have you any idea how long it would
take to try them all out, using a machine? And I'm not talking
about your miserable little computer. At the rate of one
permutation per second, you would need seven billion billion
billion billion minutes, or one hundred and twenty-three million
billion billion billion hours, which is a little more than five
million billion billion billion days, or fourteen thousand billion
billion billion years, which comes to a hundred and forty billion
billion billion centuries, or fourteen billion billion billion
millennia. But suppose you had a machine capable of generating a
million permutations per second. Just think of the time you'd save
with your electronic wheel: you'd need only fourteen thousand
billion billion millennia!
    "The real and true name
of God, the secret name, is as long as the entire Torah, and there
is no machine in the world capable of exhausting all its
permutations, because the Torah itself is a permutation with
repetitions, and the art of temurah tells us to change not the
twenty-seven letters of the alphabet but each and every character
in the Torah, for each character is a letter unto itself, no matter
how often it appears on other pages. The two hes in the name YHVH
therefore count as two different letters. And if you want to
Calculate all the permutations of all the characters in the entire
Torah, then all the zeros in the world will not be enough for you.
But go ahead, do what you can with your pathetic little
accountant's machine. A machine does exist, to be sure, but it
wasn't manufactured in your Silicon Valley: it is the holy cabala,
or Tradition, and for centuries the rabbis have been doing what no
computer can do and, let us hope, will never be able to do. Because
on the day all the combinations are exhausted, the result should
remain secret, and in any case the universe will have completed its
cycle¡Xand we will all be consumed in the dazzling glory of the
great Metacyclosynchro-tron."
    "Amen," Jacopo Belbo
said.
    Diotallevi was already
driving him toward these excesses, and I should have kept that in
mind. How often had I seen Belbo, after office hours, running
programs to check Diotallevi's calculations, trying to show him
that at least Abu could give results in a few seconds, not having
to work by hand on yellowing parchment or