very long shot, or that they do not keep checking their mailbox for that
long-awaited reply from The New Yorker. Even a philosopher the caliber
of Hume spent a few weeks sick in bed after the trashing of his master9
0 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
piece (what later became known as his version of the Black Swan problem)
by some dim-thinking reviewer—whom he knew to be wrong and to have
missed his whole point.
Where it gets painful is when you see one of your peers, whom you despise,
heading to Stockholm for his Nobel reception.
Most people engaged in the pursuits that I call "concentrated" spend
most of their time waiting for the big day that (usually) never comes.
True, this takes your mind away from the pettiness of life—the cappuccino
that is too warm or too cold, the waiter too slow or too intrusive, the
food too spicy or not enough, the overpriced hotel room that does not
quite resemble the advertised picture—all these considerations disappear
because you have your mind on much bigger and better things. But this
does not mean that the person insulated from materialistic pursuits becomes
impervious to other pains, those issuing from disrespect. Often
these Black Swan hunters feel shame, or are made to feel shame, at not
contributing. "You betrayed those who had high hopes for you," they are
told, increasing their feeling of guilt. The problem of lumpy payoffs is not
so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss
of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.
It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover
what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency
is respect.
Even economically, the individual Black Swan hunters are not the ones
who make the bucks. The researcher Thomas Astebro has shown that returns
on independent inventions (you take the cemetery into account) are
far lower than those on venture capital. Some blindness to the odds or an
obsession with their own positive Black Swan is necessary for entrepreneurs
to function. The venture capitalist is the one who gets the shekels.
The economist William Baumol calls this "a touch of madness." This may
indeed apply to all concentrated businesses: when you look at the empirical
record, you not only see that venture capitalists do better than entrepreneurs,
but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than
artists, and science does better than scientists (about 50 percent of scientific
and scholarly papers, costing months, sometimes years, of effort, are
never truly read). The person involved in such gambles is paid in a currency
other than material success: hope.
LIVING IN T H E A N T E C H A M B E R OF HOPE 91
Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards
Let me distill the main idea behind what researchers call hedonic happiness.
Making $1 million in one year, but nothing in the preceding nine, does
not bring the same pleasure as having the total evenly distributed over the
same period, that is, $100,000 every year for ten years in a row. The same
applies to the inverse order—making a bundle the first year, then nothing
for the remaining period. Somehow, your pleasure system will be saturated
rather quickly, and it will not carry forward the hedonic balance like
a sum on a tax return. As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far
more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists
call "positive affect," than on their intensity when they hit. In other words,
good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a
pleasant life you should spread these small "affects" across time as evenly
as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of
great news.
Sadly, it may be even worse for you to make $10 million, then lose
back nine, than to making nothing at all! True, you may end up with a
million (as compared to nothing), but it may be better had you got zilch.
(This assumes, of course, that you care about financial rewards.)
So from a narrowly defined accounting point of view, which I may
call here "hedonic calculus," it does not pay to shoot for one large win.
Mother Nature destined us to derive enjoyment from a steady flow of
pleasant small, but frequent, rewards. As I said, the rewards do not have
to be large, just frequent—a little bit here, a little bit there. Consider that
our major satisfaction for thousands of years came in the form of food and
water (and something else more private), and that while we need these
steadily, we quickly reach saturation.
The problem, of course, is that we do not live in an environment where
results are delivered in a steady manner—Black Swans dominate much of
human history. It is unfortunate that the right strategy for our current environment
may not offer internal rewards and positive feedback.
The same property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to
lump all your pain into a brief period rather than have it spread out over
a longer one.
But some people find it possible to transcend the asymmetry of pains
and joys, escape the hedonic deficit, set themselves outside that game—
and live with hope. There is some good news, as we see next.
9 2 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
The Antechamber of Hope
For Yevgenia Krasnova, a person could love one book, at most a few—
beyond this was a form of promiscuity. Those who talk about books as
commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can
be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You
read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it
the way it is; you do not judge it. Montaigne was asked "why" he and the
writer Etienne de la Boétie were friends—the kind of question people ask
you at a cocktail party as if you knew the answer, or as if there were an answer
to know. It was typical of Montaigne to reply, "Parce que c'était lui,
parce que c'était moi" (because it was him and because it was me). Likewise,
Yevgenia claims that she likes that one book "because it is it and because
I am me." Yevgenia once even walked out on a schoolteacher
because he analyzed that book and thus violated her rule. One does not sit
idle listening as people wax analytical about your friends. A very stubborn
schoolchild she was.
This book she has as a friend is J / deserto dei tartari, by Dino Buzzati,
a novel that was well known in Italy and France during her childhood, but
that, strangely, nobody she knows in America had heard of. Its English
title is mistranslated as The Tartar Steppe instead of The Desert of the Tartars.
Yevgenia encountered // deserto when she was thirteen, in her parents'
weekend country house in a small village two hundred kilometers outside
Paris, where their Russian and French books multiplied without the constraints
of the overfed Parisian apartment. She was so bored in the country
that she could not even read. Then, one afternoon, she opened the
book and was sucked into it.
Inebriated by Hope
Giovanni Drogo is a man of promise. He has just graduated from the military
academy with the rank of junior officer, and active life is just starting.
But things do not turn out as planned: his initial four-year assignment
is a remote outpost, the Bastiani fortress, protecting the nation from the
Tartars likely to invade from the border desert—not too desirable a position.
The fortress is located a few days by horseback from the town; there
is nothing but bareness around it—none of the social buzz that a man of
his age could look forward to. Drogo thinks that his assignment in the
LIVING IN THE A N T E C H A M B E R OF HOPE 9 3
outpost is temporary, a way for him to pay his dues before more appealing
positions present themselves. Later, back in town, in his impeccably
ironed uniform and with his athletic figure, few ladies will be able to resist
him.
What is Drogo to do in this hole? He discovers a loophole, a way to be
transferred after only four months. He decides to use the loophole.
At the very last minute, however, Drogo takes a glance at the desert
from the window of the medical office and decides to extend his stay.
Something in the walls of the fort and the silent landscape ensnares him.
The appeal of the fort and waiting for the attackers, the big battle with the
ferocious Tartars, gradually become his only reason to exist. The entire atmosphere
of the fort is one of anticipation. The other men spend their time
looking at the horizon and awaiting the big event of the enemy attack.
They are so focused that, on rare occasions, they can detect the most insignificant
stray animal that appears at the edge of the desert and mistake
it for an enemy attack.
Sure enough, Drogo spends the rest of his life extending his stay, delaying
the beginning of his life in the city—thirty-five years of pure hope,
spent in the grip of the idea that one day, from the remote hills that no
human has ever crossed, the attackers will eventually emerge and help him
rise to the occasion.
At the end of the novel we see Drogo dying in a roadside inn as the
event for which he has waited all his life takes place. He has missed it.
The Sweet Trap of Anticipation
Yevgenia read // deserto numerous times; she even learned Italian (and
perhaps married an Italian) so she could read it in the original. Yet she
never had the heart to reread the painful ending.
I presented the Black Swan as the outlier, the important event that is
not expected to happen. But consider the opposite: the unexpected event
that you very badly want to happen. Drogo is obsessed and blinded by the
possibility of an unlikely event; that rare occurrence is his raison d'être. At
thirteen, when she encountered the book, little did Yevgenia know that
she would spend an entire life playing Giovanni Drogo in the antechamber
of hope, waiting for the big event, sacrificing for it, and refusing intermediate
steps, the consolation prizes.
She did not mind the sweet trap of anticipation: to her it was a life
worth living; it was worth living in the cathartic simplicity of a single pur9
4 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
pose. Indeed, "be careful what you wish for": she may have been happier
before the Black Swan of her success than after.
One of the attributes of a Black Swan is an asymmetry in
consequences—either positive or negative. For Drogo the consequences
were thirty-five years spent waiting in the antechamber of hope for just a
few randomly distributed hours of glory—which he ended up missing.
When You Need the Bastiani Fortress
Note that there was no brother-in-law around in Drogo's social network.
He was lucky to have companions in his mission. He was a member of a
community at the gate of the desert intently looking together at the horizon.
Drogo had the advantage of an association with peers and the avoidance
of social contact with others outside the community. We are local
animals, interested in our immediate neighborhood—even if people far
away consider us total idiots. Those homo sapiens are abstract and remote
and we do not care about them because we do not run into them in elevators
or make eye contact with them. Our shallowness can sometimes work
for us.
It may be a banality that we need others for many things, but we need
them far more than we realize, particularly for dignity and respect. Indeed,
we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything
extraordinary without such peer validation—but we have the freedom to
choose our peers. If we look at the history of ideas, we see schools of
thought occasionally forming, producing unusual work unpopular outside
the school. You hear about the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, the
Cynics, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Essenes, the Surrealists, the Dadaists,
the anarchists, the hippies, the fundamentalists. A school allows someone
with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company
and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group
can be ostracized together—which is better than being ostracized alone.
If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part
of a group.
EL DESIERTO DE LOS T?RTAROS
Yevgenia met Nero Tulip in the lobby of the Hotel Danieli in Venice. He
was a trader who lived between London and New York. At the time,
LIVING IN THE A N T E C H A M B E R OF HOPE 9 5
traders from London went to Venice on Friday noon during the low season,
just to talk to other traders (from London).
As Yevgenia and Nero stood engaged in an effortless conversation, she
noticed that her husband was looking uncomfortably at them from the bar
where he sat, trying to stay focused on the pontifications of one of his
childhood friends. Yevgenia realized that she was going to see a bit more
of Nero.
They met again in New York, first in a clandestine way. Her husband,
being a philosophy professor, had too much time on his hands, so he
started paying close attention to her schedule and became clingy. The
dingier he got, the more stifled Yevgenia felt, which made him even
dingier. She dumped him, called her lawyer who was by then expecting to
hear from her, and saw more of Nero openly.
Nero had a stiff gait since he was recovering from a helicopter crash—
he gets a little too arrogant after episodes of success and starts taking uncalculated
physical risks, though he remains financially hyperconservative,
even paranoid. He had spent months immobile in a London hospital,
hardly able to read or write, trying to resist having to watch television,
teasing the nurses, and waiting for his bones to heal. He can draw
the ceiling with its fourteen cracks from memory, as well as the shabby
white building across the street with its sixty-three windowpanes, all in
need of professional cleaning.
Nero claimed that he was comfortable in Italian when he drank,
so Yevgenia gave him a copy of II deserto. Nero did not read novels—
"Novels are fun to write, not read," he claimed. So he left the book by his
