Religio is… I'm using it in a spiritual sense, [in] the sense of a pre-egoic, ultimately a post-egoic, binding that simultaneously grounds the self and its world.

But the book’s enduring appeal—the reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mail—has little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, it’s about what, in Eco’s rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties.