The Machinery Of The World Is Far

I Owe The Discovery Of Uqbar To The Conjunction Of A Mirror And An Encyclopedia.

The People Of Tlön Are Taught That The Act Of Counting Modifies The Amount Counted, Turning Indefinites Into Definites. The Fact That Several Persons Counting The Same Quantity Come To The Same Result Is For The Psychologists Of Tlön An Example Of The Association Of Ideas Or Of Memorization.

As A Boy, I Used To Marvel That The Letters In A Closed Book Did Not Get Scrambled And Lost Overnight.

I Would Define The Baroque As That Style That Deliberately Exhausts (or Tries To Exhaust) Its Own Possibilities, And That Borders On Self-caricature. The Baroque Is The Final Stage In All Art, When Art Flaunts And Squanders Its Resources.

I Do Not Write For A Select Minority, Which Means Nothing To Me, Nor For That Adulated Platonic Entity Known As ‘the Masses’. Both Abstractions, So Dear To The Demagogue, I Disbelieve In. I Write For Myself And For My Friends, And I Write To Ease The Passing Of Time.