01.14.09
Umberto Eco in Candlelight
“Intense?” asked Papa immediately after the thud of my cell phone on the wooden floor brought me back to the real world. I must have looked silly as I clutched the fat book and allowed the phone to slip from my hands carelessly, and Papa’s slightly teasing smile manifested that he was already expecting something of that sort to happen.
Like a wide-eyed little girl transfixed in an astronomy class, I engaged myself in Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, but instead of speaking of the captivating book, my stream of thought channels toward the conditions in which this book was read.
The day I embarked on my journey to The Island of the Day Before, I woke up to an ominous silence. Little did I know that for the following days, I’d be waking up to the same silence. Soon enough, I learned about the bombing of the National Transmission Corp. tower in Lanao del Norte, and while attempts to restore power are underway, we only have a few hours of electricity daily while we spend the night’s “peak hours” – my reading time – in blackness. Thank God there were no casualties in the bombing. Mindanao would rather lose electricity for a few days than lose a life to another bestial explosion.
I’ll speak circumspectly of whose machinations these were, and note on how the absence of electric-powered machines cause such extraordinary silence. Gone were the whirrs of artificiality and all one could hear was nature. For the ear accustomed to manufactured sounds, the lingering silence could be creepy, but for the nature-lover, it is music. The evenings are remarkable; that’s when I play Träumerei, or listen to Papa’s guitar, or read by candlelight and pause from the pages and wish I were a composer so I could convert to notes the syncopating raindrops, the moaning wind, the steady and reflective rhythm of every page turned, the ethereal glow of the eight candles – whirling dervishes resisting the chilly gales, the stalactitic creeping of the candle wax, and its melody, the night.
These are the circumstances in which Eco was read. As for the book? Fascinating, fascinating! Mindanao was even mentioned. One can depend on Eco to feed a person’s flights of fancy and enhance the vocabulary – even to extinct and non-existent words. He transports you to a lateral and literal universe of imagination and ideas. What an extremely brilliant author Eco is. But through it all, my astonishment lay in the motifs of philosophy, creation, metaphoric dwarves, double identities, time, space, the spheres, the cosmos, the island itself and the orange dove which echoed
Maya…
Maya…
maya…
Echo…
Eco…
eco…
.
.
mika said,
January 14, 2009 at 5:41 pm
i’m glad you and your family are alright! (and that you are enjoying the sound of the night without electricity. it really is a haunting sound; composers before electricity must have found so much inspiration from the night!)
umberto eco… sounds familiar; what’s he famous for again?
Miracle ♪♫ said,
January 15, 2009 at 9:11 am
Yeah, and not just musicians but authors, too! There’s Novalis and his hymns to the night! People who are sensitive to nature are perpetually inspired to produce art, aren’t they?
Eco’s ‘notorious’ for The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.
Thank you for your concern, Mika. Despite the circumstances there are even more reasons to be thankful. (In everything give thanks! =) )