Interstices

The great all-rounder, Umberto Eco, author of the best-seller The Name of the Rose, was not only a wonderful novelist, but also a perspective changing professor of semiotics in the University of Bologna. His seminal work on semiotics is well known in the literary circles. And, the man made a bestseller book. How could he achieve all this?

Many people have called him a man of many skills; a master of all trades, jack of none. Yet, what he actually was is merely a great time-manager. ‘Merely’ is a wrong way to describe it, because it is ultimately what differentiates between Steve Jobs and other people. We must accept this fact – we can never become someone like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

We can only be us.

But what allowed Umberto to simultaneously produce to seminal work, both on the fictional and non-fictional spheres of literature. Semiotics isn’t a lightly study. It often requires people to work long at seemingly unending pile of books, and historical texts, trying to link strange signs and make some meaning out of it. So how exactly did Umberto manage it????

In an interview, he explains, that he used to work in the interstices.

It is a well-known fact that if we could magically reduce all the empty spaces within the atom, the universe could fit within the fist of our hand. Of course we don’t really have a chance to put it to the anvil because no such infinite extension charm is available with us today (except in the world of Harry Potter).

Interstices are similarly the times that seemingly seem worthless. He explains further that “consider you are visiting my house, and I am waiting for you to come up through the elevator. In between the time, I try to do something useful. Because, by the time you would have arrived through the elevator, I would have already written a newspaper article.”

This is what interstices are. We must fill the gaps. And our lives would be fulfilled.