He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. 'It was the fourth time he had travelled along the Magdalena, and he could not escape the impression that he was retracing the steps of his life'Īt the age of forty-six General Simon Bolivar, who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. The General in his Labyrinth is the compelling tale of Simon Bolivar, a hero who has been forgotten and whose power is fading, retracing his steps down the Magdalena River by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. From the Tree to the Labyrinth is a brilliant illustration of Eco's longstanding argument that problems of interpretation can be solved only in historical context.

Moving effortlessly from analyses of Aristotle and James Joyce to the philosophical difficulties of telling dogs from cats, Eco demonstrates time and again his inimitable ability to bridge ancient, medieval, and modern modes of thought. Presenting knowledge as a network of interlinked relationships, the encyclopedia sacrifices humankind's dream of possessing absolute knowledge, but in compensation we gain the freedom to pursue an infinity of new connections and meanings. A more flexible organizational scheme is the encyclopedia, which-instead of resembling a tree with finite branches-offers a labyrinth of never-ending pathways. In Eco's view, though, the dictionary is too rigid: it turns knowledge into a closed system. Umberto Eco begins by arguing that our familiar system of classification by genus and species derives from the Neo-Platonist idea of a 'tree of knowledge.' He then moves to the idea of the dictionary, which-like a tree whose trunk anchors a great hierarchy of branching categories-orders knowledge into a matrix of definitions. The way we create and organize knowledge is the theme of From the Tree to the Labyrinth, a major achievement by one of the world's foremost thinkers on language and interpretation.

Beyond the labyrinth gillian rubinstein