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MONOLOGO INTERIOR OF AN E -BOOK by Umberto Eco
http://cogitoetvolo.it/files/anteprime%20libri/MONOLOGO%20INTERIORE%20DI%20UN%20EBOOK.pdf

Until recently I did not know what I was. I was born empty, if I can say it that way. I was not even able to say "I" . And then something got into me, a stream of letters, I felt full and I started thinking. Of course I started thinking about what had entered inside me. A wonderful feeling, because I could feel what I had in my memory as a whole, or follow it line by line, or jump from one page to another.
The text that I was, was called “From the book to the e-book”. It’s a stroke of luck that someone, I think I should call him my user or my master, had put me into that text, from whom I learned a lot about what a text is. If he had put me into something else (I learned from my text that there are texts only devoted to, say, the praise of death) I would think other things and believe in being a dying man, or a grave. Instead, I know that I am a book and what the books are.
They are a wonderful thing: a text is a universe, and – as much as I understood it – a book becomes that text that they have printed on you. This happens at least to traditional books, of which my text makes a thorough history. Traditional books are the meeting of so many sheets of paper, and a book on which it was printed, say, the Odyssey (an ancient greek poem–I’m not really sure what it tells about though) thinks and lives everything that happens and is said in the Odyssey. It lives it its entire life, which can be very long, because there are books that have lived nearly five hundred years. Of course, the users of the book can also write notes in the margins, and the book, I suppose, thinks those too. I do not know what happens with a book that bears emphasis: if the things underlined are thought with greater intensity or if the underlining simply warns that those lines have particularly interested its user. I also imagine that a book that has lived four hundred years and changed users (I inferred from my text that users are mortal, and in any case they live less long than a book) knows how to recognise the hand of its various readers, and the difference between their way of reading and interpreting the text. Perhaps there are readers who write in the margins “but that bestiality !”, and I do not know if the book feels offended, or makes an examination of conscience. It would be nice that one day someone would write a text which tells what life is like inside a book.

I imagine that bearing imprinted text is terrible for a paper book, a living hell. How will be the life of a book that tells a story of unrequited love? Will the book also be unhappy? And if the text tells a story of sex, will it feel in continuous excitement? It is nice to not being ever able to get out of the text printed on its pages? Perhaps, in the contrary, the life of a paper book is beautiful, because it spends all its life focused on the world of its text, and lives without doubts, without any suspicion of what can happen out of it - and especially without the suspicion that there are other texts that contradict it.

I do not know, because the text that they put me in. I have learned to be an e-book , an electronic book , whose pages scroll on a screen . It seems that I have a memory than that of a paper book , because a paper book can have ten, a hundred , a thousand pages , but no more . Instead I could accommodate many texts , all together. But I do not know if I could think of them all at once , or one at a time , depending on what my user activates . However, over the texts that they put me in, I have an internal program , my memory - so to speak. I understand those who are not only from the text that I host now , but by the very nature of my internal circuitry. In short , I do not know how to explain , but if I knew how and jump out of the text that I host and say "look at that curious thing , Renter this text ," I do not think that a paper book can do that, but who knows , I do not suppose I'll ever opportunities to talk with a paper book .
The text that I host and rich , and I'm learning many things about the past of paper books and the destiny of our e-book. We are , we are more fortunate than our ancestors? I'm not sure. We'll see . For now I am very happy to be born .
And the strangest thing happened . Yesterday ( modestly , I have an internal clock ) me off. When I'm off I can not live in the text that I have inside . But there is one area of ​​my memory that remains in effect : I know who I am , I know that I have a text in, even if I can not enter it.
But I do not sleep , otherwise it would stop even my internal clock , but no, just tell me rekindle know the right time , and the day and the year .
Suddenly I was back on, I heard a strange churning inside and it was as if I became another . I was in a dark forest and I were meeting three beasts , then I met a gentleman who brought me ... I can not say well what was happening to me , but I had entered into a funnel and hell - my boys - what I saw ! Luckily I was then shifted to the end of the text and it was
a wonderful thing , I saw with the woman of my life , the Virgin Mary and God Almighty in person, even if not well repeat what I saw , because one point is painful more lethargy that twenty-five centuries to the company that fe Neptune with the ' shade of Argo .
As experience - I am still living - and extraordinary , but I feel like the nostalgia obscures the previous text - I want to say that I know that ospitavo a text, but as if it were buried in the depths of my circuits , and in a certain sense they are condemned to live only in the new one ...
.................................................. .....................................
My user has to be greedy and capricious .
Of course this morning I did not put in a new text-only , but many, and now passes from one to another with ease, without giving me time to get used to .
I mean , I was really immersed in the vision of a profound and clear subsistence of a high lumen , and I seemed to see three rounds of three-color and of one dimension , when I heard a smell of soot, a whistle of locomotives and, in frost overnight almost Hyperborean , here I was throwing himself under a train . For love , I think, and a young officer from peanuts . Anna , do you? I was wondering , and I was already feeling the horror of the wheels of the locomotive that I tore the meat , when I found myself at the Discalced Carmelites , together with Athos, Porthos and Aramis , who had just challenged to a duel , to fight all four against the Cardinal's guards . An exciting experience , but then, suddenly , I again felt the agony of my flesh, and it was not the knife that Jussac , but the sprockets and the sharp blades of a single machine in a very mysterious penal colony. I was about to scream , as an e-book can do so ( perhaps I would have gone haywire horror ) when I felt my nose that stretched out of proportion for a small lie that I had just said, without malice , and after another time - and was as a kind of swoon - I was already judging exaggerated the punishment of those who had me in that moment stuck a pin in the back of his head , and I knew it was the Rocambole damn well that I was educated as a child in the noble art of the crime. ..
It was a terrible morning , my user seemed crazy , suddenly I felt walking in a non-Euclidean universe where parallel lines meet at any time, a traffic jam unbearable , and soon after I felt oppressed by a series of mysterious characters .
Only with great difficulty I felt that I had become an Arabic - Hebrew dictionary . It is hard to become a language never learned, or rather two , and I was learning the hard myself that I was just now, when the teacher asked me something. I replied , " It was I ," and the teacher told me that I had a noble heart . He called me Garrone while until just before I was convinced to call D'Artagnan . Me and approached a blond boy , I thought it was Derossi but evidently I had again changed the text, because I said his name was Jim , and he introduced me to Lord Trelawney , Dr. Livesey , and Captain Smollett . There was also a sailor with a wooden leg , but as soon as I dared to ask him something told me " on board, Ishmael, the Pequod is starting , the damn whale will not escape me this time ." I entered the belly of Moby Dick and I found my good papa , Geppetto , who was eating fried fish by candlelight . " Laius ," I cried , " I swear I did not know that this was my mother! " But at that point my mother, who think it's called Medea killed me , to spite Orestes .
I do not know if I'll be able to resist for long. I'm a book dissociated, and have many lives and how many souls have none , and I must also be careful not to get attached to a text because the day after my user could cancellarmelo .
I would love to be the paper book that contains the story of the gentleman who visited hell, purgatory and paradise. I would live in a peaceful world , where the distinction between good and evil where you have to move us know how to go from bliss to misery , and where the parallels never meet . Loved You So Long je me suis couche de bonne heure . I am a woman who is about to fall asleep and parading before the eyes of the mind ( but I would say the uterus) the things he has just experienced. I suffer because they do not match points and commas will not know where to stop . I would not be who I am , but I have to say yes yes yes ...
Umberto Eco