Eco

From Paris Review, interview with Umberto Eco (185, Summer 2008)

INTERVIEWER

You are one of the world’s most famous public intellectuals. How would you define the term intellectual? Does it still have a particular meaning?

ECO

If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.

Full Interview

Michaels

from Paris Review interview (184, Spring 2008)

Interviewer

I notice this place is full of old tools. What about them appeals to you?

Michaels

Years ago, I bought a scythe in New England, and I came home with it to my parents’. The minute I walked in the door, my father said, What did you spend money on a piece of junk like that for? He took it away from me and began to swing it around in the air, saying, Why would you want something this silly? This is a barley scythe, a left-handed barley scythe. I used one like this as a child in Poland. Why would you be interested in such a thing? How much did you spend? Ten dollars, fifteen dollars? Whatever it was, it was too much. This is a left-handed barley scythe that was handmade. I used on just like this as a child.

There was an extraordinary confusion in his excitement. He was obviously very taken with the scythe, but trivializing it every minute. How I had wasted money. What absurd preciosity I had succumbed to. And yet, what I brought home to him was his childhood.

Oe

from interview in Paris Review (183, Winter 2007)

Talking about his childhood...

“One time in the forest I was sketching trees and trying to learn their names. I caught a cold. I was in bed and it did not seem like I would live long. Will I die? I asked. My mother said, Even if you die I will give birth to you again. I asked, Wouldn’t it be a different child? And she said, I will teach that child all of the things that you know, all of the books you’ve read.”

Full interview