The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause … - Umberto Eco

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his loftiest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties.

... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.