Word: uqbar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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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