horizon line

p. 40

"You," Niketas said to himself, "are like the liar of Crete: you tell me you're a confirmed liar and insist I believe you. You want me to believe you've told lies to everybody but me. In all my years at the court of these emperors I have learned to extricate myself from the traps of masters of deceit far more sly than you...By your own confession, you no longer know who you are, perhaps because you have told too many lies, even to yourself. And you're asking me to construct the story that eludes you. But I'm not a liar of your class. In all my life I have questioned the stories of others in order to extract the truth.

p. 48

Baudolino felt a little sorry for this Frederick, so big and grand and powerful, who couldn't accept the reasoning of his subjects. And to think that he spent more time on the Italian peninsula than in his own lands. He, Baudolino said to himself, loves our people and doesn't understand why they betray him. Maybe that's why he kills them like a jealous husband.

p. 54

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. And these studia, which are slowly growing up in Bologna and in Paris, are places where learning is cultivated and transmitted, and learning is a form of power.

p. 109

In short, for anyone who did not understand what was going on, Milan seemed a merry workplace, where everyone labored with alacrity, praising the Lord. Except that it was as if time ran backwards: it seemed that from the void a new city was rising, when instead an ancient city was returning to dust and bare earth.

p. 111

Many relics that are preserved here in Constantinople are of very suspect origin, but the worshiper who kisses them perceives supernatural aromas wafting from them. It is faith that makes them true, not they who make faith true.

p. 126

This land has remained separated from every other country because it is defended by the river Sambatyon, which is as wide as the shot of the mightiest bow, but it is without water, and only sand and stones flow there furiously, making a noise so horrible that it can be heard even at the distance of a day's march, and that inanimate matter flows there so rapidly that anyone wishing to cross the river would be swept away by it.

"This is what divides us from you gentiles," Rabbi Solomon Said. "You have the freedom to practice your law, and you have corrupted it, so you seek a place where it is still observed. We have kept our law intact, but we haven't the freedom to follow it."

p. 127

My mother always told me that the language of Adam was reconstructed on her island, and it is the Gaelic language, composed of nine parts of speech, the same number as the nine materials from which the tower of Babel was built: clay and water, wool and blood, wood and mortar, pitch, linen, and bitumen.

p. 207

You have become my parchment, Master Niketas, on which I write many things that I had forgotten, as if my hand proceeded on its own. I think that one who tells stories must always have another to whom he tells them, and only thus can he tell them to himself. You remember when I wrote letters to the empress, but she didn't see them? If I committed the foolishness of letting my friends read them, it was because otherwise my letters would have had no meaning. And later, there was that moment of the kiss with the empress -- I could never tell anyone of that kiss, and I carried the memory of it inside me for years and years, sometimes savoring it as if it were your honeyed wine, and sometimes tasting a toxin in my mouth. It was only when I could tell it to you that I felt free.

p. 212

The cranes form letters in their flight without knowing the art of writing.

p. 286

But I must give you another warning: not only do merchants have a right to live, but so do thieves, and since they can't rob one another, they'll try to rob you. If you prevent them, that's your right; but if they succeed, you mustn't complain. So I advise you to carry little money in your purse, just the amount you've decided to spend, and no more.

p. 384

It happens in many armies and public administrations: those who hold power must not belong to the community they govern, so as not to feel tenderness or complicity towards the subjects.

p. 405

I reported the voyages of Saint Brendan to the Isles of the Blest, and how one day, believing he had reached a land in the midst of the sea, he descended on the back of a whale, which is a fish the size of a mountain, capable of swallowing a whole ship, but I had to explain to him what ships were, fish made of wood that cleave the waves, while moving white wings...

p. 427

She truly was afraid of nothing. She said: "God is the Unique, and he is so perfect that he does not resemble any of the things that exist or any of the things that do not; you cannot describe him using your human intelligence, as if her were someone who becomes angry if you are bad or who worries about you out of goodness, someone who has a mouth, ears, face, wings, or that is spirit, father or son, not even of himself. Of the Unique you cannot say he is or is not, he embraces all but is nothing; you can name him only though dissimilarity, because it is futile to call him Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom, Amiability, Power, Justice, it would be like calling him Bear, Panther, Serpent, Dragon, or Gryphon, because whatever you say of him you will never express him. God is not body, is not figure, is not form he does not have quantity, quality, weight, or lightness; he does not see, does not hear, does not know disorder and perturbation; he is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, thought, word, number, order, size; he is not equality and is not inequality, is not time and is not eternity he is a will without purpose. Try to understand, Baudolino: God is a lamp without a flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary multiplicity . . .He is a space that is not, in which you and I are the same thing, as we are today in this time that doesn't flow."

p. 428

Fire does not generate heat: it emanates it. Heat is the same thing as fire; if you to put out the fire, the heat would also cease. The heat of the fire is very strong where the fire is born, and it becomes gradually weaker as the flame becomes smoke. So it is with God. As he gradually expands from his own dark center, he somehow loses vigor, and he loses more and more until he becomes viscous and insensitive matter, like the shapeless wax of the melting candle. The Unique could not wish to emanate so far from himself, but he cannot resist this dissolving of himself into multiplicity or disorder.