When I was in grad school, I went to a series of lectures by Umberto Eco; they were wide-ranging talks on literary theory but very entertaining despite what you might imagine, covering everything from the freemasons to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to fables (Little Red Riding Hood) and the meaning of truth.  The lectures were eventually published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

Eco also talked a bit about his own experiences as an author.  He described how paranoid readers of his fictional books would write to him and complain that so-and-so couldn’t have moved through the moonlit night in Paris because on the date in question there was only a sliver moon.  Notwithstanding the ‘fact’ that the ‘fact’ was ‘fiction.’

He also told a beautiful story — one I still remember, although I have trouble remembering my own mobile phone number — about visiting the planetarium at Santiago de Compostela (maybe it was in Coruna, but this is my memory).  The director as a gift to him had set the night sky to the way the stars appeared at his home on the night of his birth.

At one point in the lectures, he said that we could all accept that it was true that there were no armadillos in the lecture hall — the jewel box of Sanders Theater — but that that didn’t mean they couldn’t exist in a fictional lecture hall.  At that point he held up a fake armadillo, which doesn’t appear in the book.  So beware!

Something about my day today made me remember this.