Look Both Ways

Early in her career, the journalist Cathrin Bradbury was assigned an interview with Umberto Eco. “Assigned” is something of an understatement: her boss had gestured to the train tracks outside their office in downtown Toronto and threatened to tie her to them if she didn’t deliver. Although she failed to secure the profile, she did receive a consolatory telegram from the Italian writer in the form of a poem.

The original telegram from Eco has since been lost, but decades later, while sifting through some old Day-Timers from that chapter of her life, Bradbury discovered a note about the task. As memories tend to be, this one was generative. When her “Eco episode” came back, she began to feel “another memory just beneath it” until finally it surfaced: like her, he had a thing for lists. Her thoughts continued to unspool, leading her to an interview he gave after publishing The Infinity of Lists. “How, as a human being, does one face infinity?” he said to...