Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

modest scope. He told the agent that in America it was absurd to
invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet. To this
gigantic idea he added another, a product of his nihilism:* that of
keeping the enormous enterprise secret. At that time the twenty
volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were circulating in the
United States; Buckley suggested that a methodical encyclopedia of
the imaginary planet be written. He was to leave them his mountains
of gold, his navigable rivers, his pasture lands roamed by cattle and
buffalo, his Negroes, his brothels and his dollars, on one condition:
"The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ." Buckley
did not believe in God, but he wanted to demonstrate to this
nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world.
Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828; in 1914 the society
delivered to its collaborators, some three hundred in number, the last
volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The edition was a secret
one; its forty volumes (the vastest undertaking ever carried out by
man) would be the basis for another more detailed edition, written not
in English but in one of the languages of Tlön. This revision of an
illusory world, was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius and one of its
modest demiurgi was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar
Erfjord or as an affiliate, I do not know. His having received a copy of
the Eleventh Volume would seem to favor the latter assumption. But
what about the others
*
Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist and a defender of slavery.
In 1942 events became more intense. I recall one of the first of
these with particular clarity and it seems that I perceived then
something of its premonitory character. It happened in an apartment on
Laprida Street, facing a high and light balcony which looked out
toward the sunset. Princess Faucigny Lucinge had received her
silverware from Poitiers. From the vast depths of a box embellished
with foreign stamps, delicate immobile objects emerged: silver from
Utrecht and Paris covered with hard heraldic fauna, and a samovar.
Amongest them -- with the perceptible and tenuous tremor of a
sleeping bird -- a compass vibrated mysteriously. The Princess did not
recognize it. Its blue needle longed for magnetic north; its metal case
was concave in shape; the letters around its edge corresponded to one
of the alphabets of Tlön. Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic
world into the world of reality.
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