Umberto Eco

And so I was left with a number of manuscript notebooks in my hand, and a great emptiness in my heart.

n.

“If what you saw has anything in common with the Masons, it’s the fact that Bramanti’s rite is also a pastime for provincial politicians and professional men. It was thus from the beginning: Freemasonry was a weak exploitation of the Templar legend. And this is the caricature of a caricature. Except that those gentlemen take it extremely seriously. Alas! The world is teeming with Rosicrucians and Templars like the ones you saw this evening. You mustn’t expect any revelation from them, though among their number occasionally you can come across an initiate worthy of trust.”

You see, my son, everyone is accustomed to saying that the human community is based on three forces: warriors, monks, and peasants, and this may have been true until yesterday. But we live in new times, in which the man of learning is becoming equally important, even if he is not a monk but a man who studies law, philosophy, the movement of the stars, and many other things, and who doesn't always give an account of what he is doing to his bishop or to his king.

Having an enemy is important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth

Enemies are different from us and observe customs that are not our own

From the very beginning, however, the people who become our enemies often are not those who directly threaten us (as would have been the case with the barbarians), but those whom someone has an interest in portraying as a true threat even when they aren’t.

Rather than a real threat highlighting the ways in which these enemies are different from us, the difference itself becomes a symbol of what we find threatening.

Moreover, the genre of “statement of poetics” is one that is authorized by a venerable tradition.

Above all, literature keeps language alive as our collective heritage.

By helping to create language,