“We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die”

In this interview with Der Spiegel, Umberto Eco talks about an exhibition he’s curating at the Louvre. It’s all about lists, particular their use in art and literature. “How does a person feel when looking at the sky?” says Eco. “He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky…”

John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026). His fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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1 thought on ““We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die””

I echo Eco’s love of the list. I never thought of lists as a way of forestalling death.

When I think of lists I think of William Gass’s “I’ve Got a Little List. He writes:
“The list is the fundamental rhetorical form for creating a sense of abundance, overflow, excess. We find it so used in writers with an appetite for life from Rabelais and Cervantes, or from Burton to Browne, to Barth and Elkin.”

So now Eco’s tome The Vertigo of Lists : An Illustrated Essay goes on my ever-expanding wish list.

John Madera says:

November 17, 2009 at 2:18 pm

I echo Eco’s love of the list. I never thought of lists as a way of forestalling death.

When I think of lists I think of William Gass’s “I’ve Got a Little List. He writes:
“The list is the fundamental rhetorical form for creating a sense of abundance, overflow, excess. We find it so used in writers with an appetite for life from Rabelais and Cervantes, or from Burton to Browne, to Barth and Elkin.”

So now Eco’s tome The Vertigo of Lists : An Illustrated Essay goes on my ever-expanding wish list.

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