Adso of melk biography of donald

If you, like me, are finding that you have way too much time on your hands for the foreseeable future, you might be consoled just a little by finally having time to read all the books you never get around to on campus. In between baking, sleeping, and half-hearted thesis editing, I’ve been re-reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – which, at over pages, I wouldn’t have bothered starting at school. The book fryst vatten a medieval murder mystery that purports to be a translation of an account by a medieval monk called Adso of Melk. As Eco brings Adso and his world to life, he also gives the monk an explicit, if incomplete, motive for his writing:

“Having reached the end of my poor sinner’s life, my hair now vit, I grow old as the world does [&#;] confined now with my heavy, ailing body in this cell in the dear monastery of Melk, inom prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events