The Infinity of Lists

"We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die."

Most of us will anchor our familiarity of Umberto Eco with his great novel "The Name of The Rose" (1980) and the subsequent novels of "Foucault's Pendulum", "The Island of the Day Before", and "Baudolino". But others may know of Eco's forays into assorted essays (On Literature) and then with in-depth multidisciplinary analyses of art, literature, and culture (e.g., History of Beauty, On Ugliness). Uh oh, just a moment here, I have just created a "list" of sorts in order to capture (not completely, but a start) the works of Umberto Eco, which symmetrically and ironically (perhaps not) is the focus of Eco's latest work, The Infinity of Lists (which has the title "The Vertigo of Lists" in the UK). What is it about us and our predilection for lists (or listmaking?)? At his website, Eco has the provocative opening sentence of, "We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die." Hmm, that is quite the hook, and in this elegant and aesthetically pleasing volume (published by Rizzoli International Publications - and it saturated with illustrations - a feast for the eyes!), Eco taxonomically weaves in works of art and literature to indicate his unique perspectives. You will find "coherent excess" and "chaotic enumeration" in the book along with Rimbaud, Neruda, Dali, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Joyce, all manner of collections, litanies, and cabinets of curiosities. In his quest (perhaps infinite in goal, but not humanly possible) to record and study ALL lists, Eco has intellectual fun with the reader to suggest he was not "omniscient" and thus many things were left out of his selections (of course) and the book must certainly end with "an etcetera"..but I simply would ask Professor Eco: How could you overlook Carl Linnaeus?

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