Word: uqbar
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...essay A New Refutation of Time contains a self-effacing shuffle. Borges disarms that ancient foe, ineffability, by questioning his own existence. He has done so in dozens of fanciful tales bearing such tantalizing labels as Death and the Compass, Funes, the Memorious and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Despite his arcane references, the aging (78), blind, Argentine author has gained a worldwide readership. His ficciones have also attracted numerous imitators - none of whom have the old man's grace, wit and almost magical skills of compression. A Borges story is like some spring-loaded plaything that unexpectedly...
...Symbolist poets and Ultraism, a literary offshoot of Dadaism. Later, back in Argentina, he wrote poetry and essays for avant-garde journals, and edited anthologies of Argentine literature, including a book of detective stories. But it was not until the late '30s that Borges wrote Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of the first and perhaps best known of his short fictions...
...Attracted by metaphysics, but accepting no system as true," according to Andre Maurois, "Borges makes out of all of them a game for the mind." In the chaos of the universe, the power of the imagination becomes the important thing. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Terris," a beneficent secret society of scholars formulates, over three centuries, an imaginary planet. The 40-volume encyclopedia describing Tlon--man's most vast undertaking--is discovered in a Memphis, Tenn., library in 1944. Tlon contains a "doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death...
...intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless." Seeing Sharply. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation. A story mysteriously titled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius concerns a mythical planet where people have no conception of material objects. Things have no names; they are described as they appear at the moment. People call the moon, for example, "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky." Life has dissolved into pure poetry...
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