If there is any mystery to this little world of ours—where life has sprouted by chance and where it may be trampled into the mud by chance—it is rather insipid: how is it possible that there is no mystery, riddle, puzzle, secret, or enigma that underlies and permeates it? In other words, how is it possible that there is no mystery in a world that cradles a species that cannot survive without mystery, and which is thus compelled to keep fabricating it at all costs and against all odds?

Addendum (October 21, 1989)

I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph.

From Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989 (first published in 1988), pp. 640-641.