There was one notable characteristic: it remarked that the literature of Uqbar was fantastic in character, and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mjelnas and Tlön.
In the classical culture of Tlön, there is only one discipline, that of psychology […]. This monism, or extreme idealism, completely invalidates science […]. Each state of mind is irreducible. There mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it [….]. The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, not even an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.
The plot is as follows: a man, the incredulous and fugitive student whom we already know, falls among people of the vilest class and adjusts himself to them, in a kind of contest of infamy. All at once, with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand—he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men.
To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous—and consequently less interesting—than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.
“To think, analyze and invent,” he also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”
He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him.
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, jail.
There is one conjecture, spoken from the mouths of masked heresiarchs, to the effect that the Company has never existed and never will. A conjecture no less vile argues that it is indifferently inconsequential to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.
“I do not belong to Art, but merely to the history of art.”
Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth. I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born.
To me it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book…. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. May heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but may Thy enormous Library be justified, for one instant, in one being.
“In all of [the infinite timelines],” I enunciated, with a tremor in my voice. “I deeply appreciate and am grateful to you for the restoration of Ts’ui Pen’s garden.”
“Not in all,” he murmured with a smile. “Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.”
For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything—almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.
It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front).
“You don’t believe me?” He stammered. “Don’t you see the mark of infamy written on my face? I told you the story to way I did so that you would hear it to the end. I informed on the man who took me in: I am Vincent Moon. Despise me.”
Kilpatrick was brought to his end in a theater, but he made of the entire city a theater, too, and the actors were legion.
“The next time I kill you,” said Scharlach, “I promise you the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.”
He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.
For his sake, God projected a secret miracle: German lead would kill him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would elapse between the command to fire and its execution. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.
God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; he chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.
He wiped his bloodstained knife on the turf and walked back toward the knot of houses slowly, without looking back. His righteous task accomplished, he was nobody. More accurately, he became the stranger: he had no further mission on earth, but he had killed a man.
I have mentioned that the history of the sect does not record persecutions. Still, since there is no human group which does not include partisans of the Phoenix, it is also true that there has never been a persecution which they have not suffered or a reprisal they have not carried out.
They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.
