SemiAntics

Umberto Eco is a master of wit and wisdom. In his book Foucault’s Pendulum, he craftily tells a story about how the New Testament could have been written. I found it quite amusing. Here, the main character Casaubon is talking to his girlfriend Amparo:

“Now that you mention it, let’s see. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one’s free to take it and run with it. At the end, they’ll see who’s done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but inists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn’t bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what’s happening it’s too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty…. Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere. It all goes to Peter’s head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there are locusts all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where’s all this blood coming from? The others say he’s drunk, or maybe it’s arteriosclerosis…. Who knows, maybe it all really happened that way.”

Now that’s just classy! Sometimes I wish I could be a writer…

Recently I visited the Virginia Holocaust Museum here in Richmond. It’s everything you would expect a museum about genocide to be. It has rooms that are made to look like various parts of death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and such. You can take a tour through the museum in about two hours if you take your time to read the captions and look at most things. We got there late, and we were forced to cut the tour short since the museum was closing at 5:00.The people that run the place are nice. It’s free of charge, and it’s a nice walk from VCU to downtown (though I admit we took the campus connector to MCV and walked the rest of the way.

Grace convinced me to go, as I wasn’t exactly interested in looking at a bunch of dead people. However, once I was there I realized that, even though I’ve seen it before (in Jerusalem, in fact, at the Holocaust Museum there), it’s good to think about these things somewhat frequently. It doesn’t seem too easy to forget that 6 million people were killed in less than 12 years, but it probably happens all too often. In fact, I doubt that a very large percent of the population really knows much about it. I think people forget about genocide, even though it is a reality right now (look at Darfur in Sudan, Africa, for instance). The Virginia Holocaust Museum is a really good way to remind yourself not to forget. Maybe one day we can stop genocide before it starts.

Here is the website:Virginia Holocaust Museum