Gravitas

Eco:

That was when I saw the pendulum...

I was roused by a listless exchange between a boy who wore glasses and a girl who unfortunately did not.

"It's Foucault's Pendulum," he was saying. "First tried out in a cellar in 1851, then shown at the Observatoire, and later under the dome of the Pantheon with a wire sixty-seven meters long and a sphere weighing twenty-eight kilos. Since 1855 it's been here, in a smaller version, hanging from that hole in the middle of the rib."
"What does it do? Just hang there?"
"It proves the rotation of the earth. Since the point of suspension doesn't move..."
"Why doesn't it move?"
"Well, because a point... the central point, I mean, the one right in the middle of all the points you see... it's a geometric point; you can't see it because it has no dimension, and if something has no dimension, it can't move, not right or left, not up or down. So it doesn't rotate with the earth. You understand? It can't even rotate around itself. There is no 'itself.'"
"But the earth turns."
"The earth turns, but the point doesn't. That's how it is. Just take my word for it."
"I guess it's the Pendulum's business."

Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off-- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter-- their first and last encounter-- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

From Umberto Eco's Novel: Foucalt's Pendulum