Great reflections on a the pace of literature in the Postscript of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco about a crime investigation in a medieval monastery.
"But there was another reason for including those long didactic passages. After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey's own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, as much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
"Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains; you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace, otherwise you stop right away. . . .
"In narrative, the breathing is derived not from the sentences but from the broader units, from the scansion of events. Some novels breathe like gazelles, others like whales or elephants. Harmony lies not in the length of the breath but it its regularity."
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