The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana II -- chapter 1: OF THE MEMORY and SOUL

I am not a skeptical reader.  Where so many people are mistrusting by nature, I'm, well, even gullible.  This applies as much to reading as it does to locking doors and triple-checking the curling iron or stove top.  When I read Steinbeck or Carroll, or even Joyce, I feel justified in my level of trust, as their writing so closely reflects the issues, weaknesses, and prejudices of their lives--not so much when I read Eco.  There's never a sense of autobiography when you read his books, except, perhaps for Mysterious Flame (more on that in a minute).  There's rarely that sense that his Freudian psyche rests just between the lines.  His craft is opaque, and it makes sense, in a literalist's kind of way: his writing is incredibly, even--and so it would seem if he didn't provide proof against it--impossibly, dense.  The problem with such authorial opacity for a trusting, gullible kinda guy like me, is that I believe there's indeed nothing on the other side of the glass.  Well, this isn't the case.  While Eco mostly leaves himself out of the book, as far as we can see or intuit or study out via the generally available biographical information, there is a lot here.  Surprisingly (at least to me), and at perhaps the level most literarily profound and snobby, there's a deeply Joycean philosophy at work here, which I will try, despite my amateurism, to point out (as it relates essentially to the most fundamental pieces of Modernism); at a less intimidating level (you know--without all the literary labels that otherwise identify and describe), there is a underlining, beautiful metaphor--even allegory--at work in this book which may even pose as a window, no matter how small or filmy, into Eco himself.  If there is a book of Eco's with anything autobiographical, this is it.  We just have to press through all the incredibly abundant intellectual bread crumbs to get there--not that I mind.

1. Where later we get visual mementos (flip or scroll through your copy of the book), when Yambo (this is a nickname: his real name is Giambattista Bodoni) first awakes, they come via literary quotations.  What is the thematic line running through these literary--poetic very visual, at least for words--references, and how are they so appropriate to the situation (you can get this without knowing the sources for all these quotations)?
2. Note the juxtaposition of technology looking quantitatively into Yambo's brain (barely mentioned) and the series of recollections--literary, historical, etcetera--which accord us a qualitative purview.  
3. I'm positing an idea that may work out to be nothing, but the context here offers possibility:  If the experience of Yambo's amnesia (the world that begins when he wakes up and ends, presumably, when he regains his memory) is a microcosm for mortal existence, what do you make of his standing up from his hospital bed?  While we're at it, what other parallels do you see between newborns and this 60-year-old (nearly) man?
4. Interesting the notion of the mirror's reflection (and this apart from Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass): with the exception of those few individuals with perfectly symmetrical faces, the face one sees in the mirror is not the same face that another sees.  The effect is less significant with both faces simultaneously before you, like Eco's double-portrait (above), but if you take it as truth (the difference between reflection and the "real"), how does it apply here?
5. "...from now on I think I will brush my teeth every day, it feels nice" (emphasis added).
6. There's an irony here: "...if we had to record and store all the stimuli we encounter, our memory would be a bedlam."
7. Also, a line shortly after that of 6 gives indication of the type of our allegory: "Where the brain stores memories, however, is still a matter of debate, and more than one area is certainly involved."  Have you already spotted it, especially while flipping/scrolling through the pages?
8. the Collegno amnesiac
9. Big question: Are we our memories?  In tandem with this, memories are nearly as "plastic," as says Yambo's doctor, as the mind.  How we perceive our own memories is practically never how they exactly happened.  Thoughts?
10. What if his wife were ugly?  I can't help but wonder--and it's impossible to prove one way or the other, but this is the romantic side of me--if there's some essence of his love reaching through the fog and affecting his impression of her.  Is she really so objectively pretty, or is the subjectivity of long love acting as, well, goggles for Yambo?
11. (By the way, Eco is a decided atheist.  This may affect some of your thoughts regarding the metaphors of the book and memory.  For instance, while reading I couldn't help thinking about what I believe, personally, about our "pre-existence," and how, as we don't remember living with God before birth, this might tie in somehow to Yambo's memory selectively excluding memories tied to emotion.)
12. I'd love to say that the fog of Northern Italy is legendary, but I don't know the legends.  What I do know is that my own experience with fog in Northern Italy would easily qualify as the stuff of legend!  Pea soup, even, is a modest modifier--more like damp, wool curtain, only ghostly....  Sorry.  I'll stop.
13. Metaphorically or not (just forget the diagnosis for a minute), why the lack of emotion, especially when seeing his kids and grandkids?  Does he feel remorse for not feelings nostalgic?  Is such really a source of connection to the soul?
14. "Remembering is a labor, not a luxury," and "Some one said that it acts like a convergent lens in a camera obscura: it focuses everything, and the image that results from it is much more beautiful than the original" (see number 9).