Umberto Eco has grown wiser with age, and it shows no better than when he discusses stupidity. Rolling forward on a low couch in the dimly lit lounge bar of his New York hotel, the oval-shaped Eco says the best way to face mortality is to realise how little there is to miss. At 75, the recently retired semiotics professor from Bologna harbours no false expectations of his fellow mortals. When another writer's work displeases him, he just sighs philosophically and thinks: 'If he were intelligent, he would be the professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.'
With 34 honorary doctorates (and almost as many declined), Eco has a rare erudition. His agile intellect, as adept at descanting on Superman as Shakespeare, once prompted novelist and composer Anthony Burgess to declare enviously: 'No man should know so much.'
Eco pioneered the academic study of popular culture in the 1960s before it fell into vogue, at a time when, he says, 'Many academics read detective stories and comic strips at night but didn't talk about
it because it was considered like masturbation'.
He then defied the conventional wisdom of publishing, that abstruse ideas cannot turn a profit, when his 1980 debut novel, The Name of the Rose, shifted 50 million copies. Superficially a mystery set in a 14th-century abbey, the novel brimmed with such arcana as passages of untranslated Latin and a love scene stitched from the words of religious mystics. 'Readers are not as stupid as publishers believe,' Eco says animatedly.
The name 'Eco' carries similar clout in publishing to 'Armani' in fashion. His latest book, On Ugliness, tours the history of unsightliness in western art - an assemblage of images with a commentary too thin for any art connoisseur but bearing a name to guarantee the book a place on coffee tables worldwide.
A selection of Eco's occasional pieces was recently published as Turning Back the Clock, but could just as easily have been entitled On Stupidity because it charts the decline of public life in the age of media populism.