The Infinite Library.
tart-pastry:
The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
This mind-expanding line is from a short story by the Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges, called “The Library of Babel.”
It conceives of the universe as a seemingly infinite library, with interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves.
ser inmortal es baladí; menos el hombre, todas las criaturas lo son, pues ignoran la muerte; lo divino, lo terrible, lo incompreensible, es saberse inmortal (…). la muerte (o su ilusión) hace preciosos y patéticos a los hombres. éstos conmueven por su condición de fantasmas; cada acto que ejecutan puede ser último
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
…there is nothing on earth that does not contain the seed of a possible Hell; a face, a word, a compass, a cigarette advertisement, are capable of driving a person mad if he is unable to forget them.
“
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Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ in Labyrinths (via simstim)
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no has despertado a la vigilia, sino a un sueño anterior. ese sueño está dentro de otro, y así hasta lo infinito, que es el número de granos de arena. el camino que habrás de desandar es interminable y morirás antes de haber despertado realmente
“
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— jorge luis borges em ‘la escritura del dios’
(inception?)
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