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A review by ayarezk
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
5.0
Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
Although a lot of living things recognize patterns, humans may be the only ones to assign symbolic meaning — sometimes deeply nuanced or with powerful emotional content — to those patterns.
Human beings try too hard to decipher symbols and meaning, they feed off them, consume them, till nothing is left there to decipher, and they end up where they began, or worse....no meaning and exhausted futile endeavors.
Eco:
The title The Name of the Rose "came to me virtually by chance." In the Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Eco claims to have chosen the title "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left".
Although a lot of living things recognize patterns, humans may be the only ones to assign symbolic meaning — sometimes deeply nuanced or with powerful emotional content — to those patterns.
Human beings try too hard to decipher symbols and meaning, they feed off them, consume them, till nothing is left there to decipher, and they end up where they began, or worse....no meaning and exhausted futile endeavors.
Eco:
The title The Name of the Rose "came to me virtually by chance." In the Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Eco claims to have chosen the title "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left".