Long ago, Umberto Eco got me to thinking about the importance of lists.
It’s a basic human activity. Human beings make lists.
In his essay “My Lists,” Eco made a distinction between poetic and practical lists. We all know about practical lists and the satisfaction that comes from checking off the last item at the grocery store. Practical lists are finite. But poetic lists are open. They suggest infinity.
Eco cites Wisława Szymborkska’s poem “Possibilities” as an example:
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats …
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
It’s close to magic: A finite person has infinite possibilities in terms of personality, and is thus infinitely interesting.
There are famous lists in literature: The catalog of ships in Homer’s Iliad, the genealogies in the Bible.
All this is interesting to a writer because each of us collects items for a list from a point of view. If you want your fictional character to stand out — that is, be distinct — start with a list of his or her preferences.
When I was a boy, my baseball card collection was heavy on Cardinals. My cousin’s favored Giants. It was a small but telling difference in the way we viewed the world.
And of course the things we collect, and therefor list, varies. Some children collect baseball cards. Others collect bugs, and still others collect stories. What the child chooses to include and exclude tells a tale. It’s what interests him. It’s what moves her.
I mentioned (Dec. 31) that I sometimes remember to mark the days of writers and artists who have influenced me. Perhaps you guessed that this note marks the birthday of one my saints.
Umberto Eco was born on Jan. 5, 1932 in Alessandria, Italy. The man who wondered why Homer was considered a creative writer while Plato was not always had interesting things to say.
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