he older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God’s will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; and as the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently, without asking too many questions.

This was the first passage I ever highlighted in a novel, and I remember the moment when I did: palms sweating, hand shaking, holding my trusty green Stabilo, wondering if my mother would reprimand me for desecrating a book had she found out.

It is on page 393 of my now-yellowing copy of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which I bought for a whopping 575 pesos. I had to eat chicharon and rice for lunch over the next week to recover my financial losses.

That is not to say I understood Umberto Eco back then. To be quite frank, I didn’t. I read slowly and thoughtfully and highlighted a few passages, but in the end grasped only the literal level of the story.

I didn’t get the title either. I was 15 then, and every step was an act of courage: from the moment I decided to pick up an author with a strange name, to the papercuts I bore as battle scars, a display of valor as I charged into the realm of serious literature.
I admitted that initial defeat, but promised Eco a rematch someday.

Quite an appropriate metaphor, I think. My love for literature, in many ways, has been a war I have waged for most of my life.

I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was 12. I kept going back to the high school library every day until I finished it, because the librarian said I was too young to be allowed to borrow it. I had never read curse words in a book before.

It was also around that time that I bought myself a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which my mother found among my things and took away before I had even started (and in hindsight, wisely so). She said she’d give it back to me when I turned 15. On my 15th birthday, I woke up early in the morning to reclaim the book. She had given it away.

I was at that time of my life when Charles Dickens was too verbose, John Grisham too predictable, Paulo Coelho pseudo-profound, – all of them far too safe.

It is a restiveness often associated with youth, but I did not think it to be so simple. It is a discontent of the mind, a hunger for more, and, I suspect, one that is continually fed but never satiated in the course of a lifetime.

Although I could not articulate it at the time, I was looking for something great — a piece of literature that would engage and affect, with the scope of its story and the gravity of its implications. I wanted to know different things and see things differently through the medium I knew best — words.

Longinus wrote in the third century BC: “Is it not by risking nothing, by never aiming high, that a writer of low or middling powers keeps generally clear of faults and secure of blame? Whereas the loftier walks of literature are by their very loftiness perilous?” Longinus is still right. Good literature is timeless like that. “Whatever is useful or needful lies easily within man’s reach,” he goes on to say, “but he keeps his homage for what is astounding.”

I have since gotten myself a new copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it, along with The Catcher in the Rye, remains on my list of most astounding books, if not to the world on a grand scale, at least to the consciousness of the individual. As for Umberto Eco…

Last semester, in my Philosophy of Language class, the professor asked for a show of hands as to who had already read The Name of the Rose. I was one of the only two people in the room who had. He nodded in my direction — “I’m impressed” — and went on to explain that the novel is difficult to understand because it employs something in Philosophy of Language called Semiotics. What the hell, right?

My professor gave me a 1.5 for that class at the end of the semester, boosting my confidence somewhat.

Now, I’m thinking of making good the promise I made to Eco some five years ago. For love’s sake. My relationship with literature has always been a romance, after all, and it sometimes means going back and trying again. I mean, sure I lost that first battle. But I could still win the war.

(The author is a third year Philosophy major at the University of the Philippines-Diliman)