I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies—all joined, articulated, coherent…
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Borges is the first author to be featured twice in TBS. And this week, even though it’s five lines, it’s actually one sentence. His world-building here is so efficient and yet so expansive, and even though he’s talking about a fictional world, you can see the size of a mind like his. What’s even more impressive is that this is a world within a world: this world is nestled in a frame story of a researcher who read an account of an Atlantis-like world that was brilliant but lost.
Last week: Voltaire gives us a ratio.
Next week: Mary Oliver gives instructions for living a life.
See the index for what’s been posted and what’s to come.
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