How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays by Umberto Eco Read Free Book Online Page A

not watching TV. They applaud at funerals, not because they are pleased or because they want to please the dear departed, but so as not to feel like shadows among other shadows, to make sure they are alive and real, like the images they see on the tiny screen. One day I was visiting a Bonga house when a relative entered, saying, "Granny was just run over by a truck!" The others all sprang to their feet and clapped wildly.
    I cannot say that the Bongas are our inferiors. Indeed, one of them told me that they plan to conquer the world. And this idea is not entirely Platonic, as I realized when I came home. That evening I turned on the TV and I saw a host introducing the girls who assisted him, then announcing that he would do a comic monologue, and concluding with: "And now our ballet!" A distinguished gentleman, debating grave political problems with another distinguished gentleman, at a certain point broke off to say, "And now, a break for the commercials." Some entertainers even introduced the audience. Others, the camera that was filming them. Everyone applauded.
    Distressed, I left the house and went to a restaurant famous for its nouvelle cuisine. The waiter arrived, bringing me three leaves of lettuce. And he said, "This is our macédoine of laitue lombarde, dotted with rughetta from Piedmont, finely chopped and dressed with sea salt, marinated in the balsamic vinegar of the house, anointed with first-pressing virgin olive oil from Umbria."
    1987

How Not to Know the Time
    The watch whose description I am reading (Patek Philippe calibre 89) is a pocket watch, a double case in eighteen-carat gold, endowed with thirty-three functions. The magazine article introducing the watch does not indicate the price, I suppose because of lack of space (though it would suffice to indicate the number of billions without printing all the zeros). Seized by a profound frustration, I went out and bought myself a new Casio for fifty thousand lire, just as all those who feel a mad desire for a Ferrari go out and calm themselves by purchasing at least a car radio. Anyway, to carry a pocket watch, I would have to buy an appropriate waistcoat as well.
    Or, I told myself, I could keep it on the table. I would spend hours and hours knowing the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade, the century, the year's position in the leap-year cycle, hour, minute, and second of daylight saving time, hour, minute, and second in the time zone of my choice, temperature, sidereal time, moon phase, time of dawn and time of sunset, equation of time, position of the sun in the zodiac—not to mention the fun I could have shuddering at the infinity of the complete and mobile depiction of the stellar map, or pressing the stop button at the various dials of the chronograph and the tachymeter, or deciding when I should rest a moment and relax in the assurance of the built-in alarm. I was forgetting: a special indicator would show how much power remained. And still another thing: if I wanted, I could also know the exact time. But why should I?
    If I were to possess this miracle, I would have no interest in knowing that it is ten minutes past ten. On the contrary, I would observe the rise and the setting of the sun (and I could do this even in a darkened room), I would learn the temperature, I would cast horoscopes, I would dream in the daytime of the blue dial where I could see the stars at night, but I would spend the night meditating on the time remaining before Easter. With such a watch it is no longer necessary to bother about external time, because that would become our sole concern for all our lives; and the time the watch narrates would be, not the immobile reflection of eternity, but eternity in progress. In other words, time would be only a fabled hallucination produced by that magic mirror.
    I raise these issues because, for a while now, there have been magazines available devoted to collectible watches, rather expensive magazines printed on shiny