How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays

by Umberto Eco

  Research bogs down also because the bureaucratic routine makes us waste time in solving ridiculous problems. I am the head of a university department. Some years ago we were told to make an inventory of the department's physical possessions, a scrupulous list. Our only available employee was supposed to deal with a thousand other questions. But it was possible to farm out the task to a private organization that asked for three hundred thousand lire. We had the money, but in funds meant for inventoriable materials. How could we declare that an inventory was inventoriable?

  I had to set up a committee of logicians, who suspended their own researches for three days. In my statement of the problem they saw something comparable to The Set of Normal Sets. Then they decided that the act of compiling an inventory, as it is an act, is not an object and therefore cannot be inventoried, but they further decided that its output is the catalogue of the inventory and, as this is an object, it can be inventoried. We asked the private firm to bill us not for the act but for its result, a result that we then inventoried. For several days I distracted serious scholars from their specific tasks, but I avoided going to jail.

  Some months ago the janitors came and told me we were without toilet paper. I told them to buy some. The secretary told me I currently had funds only for inventoriable materials, and pointed out that while toilet paper can be inventoried, the natural tendency of such paper is to vanish, for reasons I prefer not to go into, and once it has vanished, it vanishes also from the inventory. I formed a committee of biologists to ask how we could inventory used toilet paper, and the answer was that such a thing is possible, but at a very high human cost.

  I summoned a committee of jurists, who supplied me with the solution. I receive the toilet paper, I inventory it, and I require its distribution among the rest rooms for scientific purposes. If the paper disappears, I report the theft of catalogued material by unknown criminals. Unfortunately, I have to repeat this process every two days, and an inspector from the Secret Services has uttered some heavy insinuations, criticizing an institution that can be infiltrated by unidentified crooks so easily and so frequently. I am under suspicion, but I have an iron-clad alibi. They'll never get me.

  The flaw is that to find the solution I had again to remove illustrious men of learning, for days and days, from research that would be of use to our country, while we wasted taxpayers' money on hours of work from teachers and staff, not to mention telephone calls and fax paper. But no one is ever indicted for squandering government money if everything is done within the law.

  1986

  How to Spend Time

  When I call the dentist to make an appointment and he tells me that he does not have an hour free at any time in the coming week, I believe him. He is a serious professional. But when someone invites me to a conference, or to a roundtable discussion, or asks me to edit a Festschrift, or write an essay, or join a panel of experts, and I say I haven't time, no one believes me. "Come now, Professor," he says, "a person like yourself can always make time." Obviously we humanists are not considered serious professionals we are idlers.

  I've done some figuring. And I would urge my colleagues with similar occupations to make their own calculations and tell me if I am right. In a normal year (not a leap year) there are 8,760 hours. Reckon eight hours' sleep per night, one hour a day to get up, shave, and dress, add a half hour for undressing and setting the glass of water on the commode, and no more than two hours for meals, and we reach a total of 4,197.5 hours. Two hours for getting around the city adds another 730 hours annually.

  Holding three classes a week, each lasting two hours, and setting aside one afternoon for advising students (100 hours), I spend at the university—in the twenty weeks into which I condense my teaching—220 hours, to which I add 24 hours of exams, 12 hours of examining theses, and 78 hours for faculty meetings and committees. On an average of five theses a year, each averaging 350 pages, each page to be read at least twice, before and after revisions, calculating three minutes per page, I come to 175 hours. For shorter papers, since my assistants deal with many of them, I assume only four for each of our six sessions, averaging thirty pages each: counting five minutes per page what with reading and preliminary discussion; add another 60 hours. Not including my own research, we reach 569 hours in all.

  I edit a semiotics review, VS, which publishes three numbers yearly, a total of 300 pages. Not counting time spent reading and rejecting manuscripts, ten minutes per page (evaluation, revision, proofs) comes to 50 hours. I direct two series of scholarly volumes pertinent to my field. Six books a year totaling 1,800 pages; at ten minutes per page, we have another 300 hours. Translations of my own texts—essays, books, articles, papers read at conferences: considering only the languages I can check, I cover an annual average of 1,500 pages at twenty minutes per page (reading, checking against the original, and conferring with the translator, in person, by telephone, or by letter), and that makes 500 hours. Then there are my original writings. Even assuming I do not write a book, essays, papers, reports, notes for lectures, etc., easily amount to 300 pages. If we include time spent thinking, making notes, writing, and revising, at least one hour is spent on each page—another 300 hours. My weekly magazine column, at an optimistic estimate, what with choosing a subject, making notes, consulting a few books, then drafting it, cutting it to the required length, dictating it, and sending it off, takes three hours each week. Multiplying by fifty-two weeks gives 156 hours. (I am not calculating time spent on other, exceptional articles.) Finally, my mail, to which—still leaving much unanswered—I dedicate three mornings a week from nine to one, occupies 624 hours.

  I calculate that last year, accepting only ten percent of the proposals received, and limiting myself to conferences closely associated with my discipline, at which I presented my own or my colleagues' research, and various unavoidable appearances (academic ceremonies, meetings required by the relevant ministries), I have totaled 372 hours of active presence (I do not count wasted time). Since many of these engagements were abroad, I calculate 323 hours of travel. This calculation considers that a Milan-Rome trip involves four hours, including taxi to the airport, waiting time, flight, taxi into Rome, settling in at the hotel, and arriving at the meeting place. A trip to New York consumes twelve hours.

  It all adds up to 8,121.5 hours. Subtracting them from the 8,760 hours in a year, I am left with 638.5 hours, in other words about 1 hour 40 minutes per day, which I can devote to sex, conversation with friends and family, funerals, medical care, shopping, sport, theater. As you see, I have not calculated the time spent reading printed matter (books, articles, comics) not part of my work. Assuming I spent my travel time reading, in 323 hours, at five minutes per page (simple reading and annotations), I have had the possibility of reading 3,876 pages, corresponding to a mere 12.92 books of 300 pages each. And what about smoking? Sixty cigarettes a day, if each one requires half a minute (finding the pack, lighting up, putting it out), comes to more than 182 hours. Too many. I have to give up smoking.

  1988

  How to Buy Gadgets

  The aircraft flies majestically over boundless prairies, immense deserts. This American continent can still offer moments of solitary, almost tactile encounter with nature. I am forgetting civilization, but it so happens that in the pocket of the seat back before me, along with instructions for rapid evacuation (of the plane, in the unlikely event of an emergency), a pamphlet with information about the in-flight movie, and the program of the Brandenburg Concertos available through the headset, there is a copy of Discoveries, a brochure that lists, with alluring illustrations, a series of objects that can be purchased via mail order. In the days that follow, on other flights, I discover analogous publications: The American Traveler, Gifts with Personality, and their similars.

  They make irresistible reading, I am won over by them, and I forget nature, so monotonous because, at least here, "non facit saltus" (and I am hoping my aircraft will behave in the same fashion). Culture, as we know, is all the
more interesting if it serves to revise and correct nature. Nature is tough and hostile; culture, on the contrary, allows people to do things with less effort, saving time. Culture frees the body from the enslavement of toil and opens the way to contemplation.

  Just think, for example, how tedious it is to handle a nasal spray, one of those little pharmaceutical bottles that you press with two fingers to allow a beneficent aerosol to penetrate the nostrils. But relief is at hand! Just insert the bottle into the Viralizer machine ($4.95), and it is squeezed for you, so efficiently that the spray reaches the most intimate areas of the respiratory tract. Naturally, you have to hold the machine in your hand, and the photographs suggest a Kalashnikov being fired, but then everything comes at a price.

  I am struck (but I hope not literally shocked) by Omniblanket, which costs all of $150. At the simplest level, it is an electric blanket, but it can be programmed so that the temperature varies from one part of your body to another. In other words, if during the night your back feels cold but your groin tends to sweat, you adjust the program accordingly. Omniblanket will then keep your back warm and your groin cool. If you are nervous and toss and turn in your sleep, ending up with your head at the foot, then you're just out of luck. You will roast your testicles or whatever you have in that area, depending on your sex. I doubt the inventor can be asked to make improvements, because it seems he was burned to a cinder some time ago.

  Naturally, in your sleep, you might snore and disturb your partner, if you have one. Well, in that case, try Snorestopper, a kind of watch you fasten onto your wrist before sleeping. The moment you begin to snore the Snorestopper, alerted by an audio-sensor, emits an electronic signal that, from your arm, reaches some of your nerve centers and interrupts something or other; anyway, you stop snoring. It costs only $45. One drawback: it is not advisable for those with heart trouble, and I wonder if it might not endanger the health even of an Olympic athlete. Furthermore, it weighs two pounds. You could use it, no doubt, with your husband or wife after decades of familiar intimacy, but hardly with a near-stranger during a night of romance. Making love with a two-pound weight on your wrist could cause alarming side effects.

  It is well known that, to reduce their cholesterol levels, the Americans have long since taken up jogging: they run for hours and hours until they drop dead of a heart attack. Pulse-Trainer ($59.95), worn on the wrist, is attached by a wire to a little rubber sheath slipped over the index finger. When your cardiovascular system is on the brink of collapse, an alarm goes off, apparently. A real achievement, if you consider that in underdeveloped countries a person stops running only when he is out of breath—a highly primitive criterion, and perhaps for this reason children in Ghana are not brought up to jog. It is curious, however, that despite such neglect, their blood cholesterol levels are almost imperceptible. With Pulse-Trainer you may run without a care and, further, if you attach to your chest and your waist the two Nike Monitor straps, an electronic voice, programmed by a microprocessor and featuring Doppler-Effect UltraSound, will tell you how many miles you have run and your median speed ($300).

  For the animal lover I would advise Bio/Bet. You slip it around your dog's neck and it emits ultrasounds (Pmbc Circuit) that kill fleas. And it costs only $25. I don't know whether, applied to your own body, it would eliminate crabs; I'd be afraid of overkill. Batteries not included. The dog has to go out and buy his own.

  Shower Valet ($34.95), a single unit that can be hung on the wall, provides you with a no-mist shaving mirror, integrated radio-TV, and both razor-blade and shaving-cream dispensers. According to the ad, it can transform your boring morning routine into an "experience to remember." Spice Track ($36.95) is an electric machine stocked with little tubes of all the spices you might wish. In poor households the spices are kept in a row on a shelf over the gas stove, and when, for example, the family wants some cinnamon on its daily dish of caviar, they have to sprinkle the spice with their fingers. But, as a member of the privileged class, you will simply tap out an algorithm (in Turbo-Pascal, I believe), and the spice of your choice will come spinning to a stop right in front of you.

  If you want to give that special person a present for his or her birthday, a mere thirty dollars is enough to have him/her sent a copy of the New York Times of the date of his/her birth. If he/she was born on the day of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, or on the day of the Messina earthquake, that's just too bad. This gift can also be useful in humiliating people you dislike, if they happen to have been born on a day when nothing occurred.

  During flights of some length, for three or four dollars, you can hire headsets that allow you to hear various musical programs and the sound track of the in-flight movie. For frequent and compulsive travelers with a pathological fear of AIDS, the sum of $19.95 will buy a personal, or rather personalized (sterilized), headset you can carry with you whenever you fly.

  As you move from one country to another, you will want to know how many German marks a British pound is worth, or how many Spanish doubloons you need to buy a thaler. The underprivileged use a pencil or a ten-dollar pocket calculator. They look up the exchange rate in the newspaper and they multiply. But the rich can purchase a twenty-dollar Currency Converter: it gives the same answer as the calculator, but every morning your CEO has to reprogram it according to the newspaper values, and in all likelihood it is unable to answer the (non-monetary) question: what's six times six? The exquisite aspect is that this instrument, costing twice as much, does half what the others can do.

  Then there are the various miracle engagement organizers (Master Day Time, Memory Pal, Loose-leaf Timer, etc.). A miracle organizer, superficially, is like an ordinary engagement book (except that as a rule it won't fit into any pocket). As in an ordinary engagement book, for example, after September 30 you find October 1. What changes is the description. Imagine—the helpful example goes—that on January 1 you make an appointment for 10 A.M. on December 20, almost twelve months in the future. No human mind can memorize such an insignificant detail for so long. So what do you do? On January 1, you open the book to the page for December 20 and you write, "10 A.M., Mr. Smith." Wonder of wonders! For most of the rest of the year you can forget that burdensome engagement. And then, at 7 A.M. on December 20, as you are eating your breakfast cereal, you open the book and, as if by miracle, you remember your appointment.... But what if on December 20—I ask—you wake up at eleven and don't look at your book until noon? Answer: if you have spent fifty dollars for the miracle organizer, you will at least have the common sense to get up every morning at seven.

  To save time at your toilet on that busy December 20 there is the tempting Electric Nose Hair Remover, or Rotary Clipper, for sixteen dollars. This is an instrument that would have fascinated the Marquis de Sade. You stick it into your nose (as a rule) and, as it rotates, it snips off the hairs inside, inaccessible to the nail scissors with which the poor usually, and vainly, attempt to cut them. I haven't been able to find out whether or not there is a macro version for your pet elephant.

  Cool Sound is a portable refrigerator for picnics, with built-in TV. The Fish Tie is a necktie in the form of a cod, one hundred percent polyester. The Coin Changer (a little machine that dispenses small change) spares you the trouble of having to dig into your pocket before buying the newspaper: unfortunately, it takes up the space of the reliquary containing St. Alban's femur. There is no information as to where you will find the coins to fill it.

  Tea, provided it is of good quality, requires only a vessel for boiling water, a spoon, and, if you like, a strainer. Tea Magic ($9.95) is a highly complicated apparatus that succeeds in making the preparation of a cup of tea as laborious as that of a cup of Turkish coffee.

  I suffer from various liver ailments, excess uric acid, atrophic rhinitis, gastritis, housemaid's knee, tennis elbow, avitaminosis, articular and muscular pain, hammertoe, allergic eczemas, and perhaps also leprosy. Fortunately I am not a hypochondriac into the bargain. But the fact is that I must remember eve
ry day, at the right time, which pill to take. I have been given a silver pillbox, but I forget to fill it in the morning. Moving around with all those filled bottles means that you must then spend a fortune in leather goods, and it's also inconvenient when you use your skateboard. Now Tablets Cupboard has found the solution to all that. Occupying no more space than a Volvo, it accompanies you throughout your working day and, rotating, automatically it offers you the right pill at the right moment. More elegant, however, is the Electronic Pill Box ($19.85) for patients who have no more than three diseases at any one time. The box has three compartments and a built-in computer that emits a beep at the moment you are to take the pill.

  Trap-Ease is magnificent if there are mice in your home. You insert some cheese and set the trap, and then you can even go out to the opera. In a normal trap, the mouse, on entering, touches a spring activating a metal bar that kills him. Trap-Ease, on the contrary, is designed in the shape of an obtuse angle. If the mouse dawdles in the vestibule, he is spared (but he doesn't get to eat the cheese). If he nibbles, the object turns 94 degrees and a shutter comes down. Since the device (which costs eight dollars) is transparent, you can, if you choose, watch the mouse in the evening when there's, nothing good on TV; or you can liberate it in the fields (the ecological option), or throw the whole thing in the garbage, or—during sieges—empty the trap directly into a pot of boiling water (or oil).

  LeafScoop is a glove that transforms your hands into those of a palmiped born, through radioactive mutation, from the crossbreeding of a duck with a pterodactyl via Dr. Quatermass. It is used in the collection of fallen leaves in your eighty-thousand-acre park. Spending a mere $12.50, you save the salary of a gardener and a gamekeeper (we recommend it to Lord Chatterley's attention). TieSaver covers your neckties with a protective oily film so that, Chez Maxim, you can eat tomato sandwiches without then appearing at the Board of Directors meeting looking like Dr. Barnard after a difficult transplant. Only fifteen dollars. Ideal for those who still use brilliantine. You can wipe your forehead with the tie.