一
I discovered Uqbal with the help of a mirror and an encyclopedia. Mirror hangs disconcertingly at the end of the hallway of a villa at Calle Go?a and Ramos Mejia; encyclopedia pretends to be Encyclopedia Anglo-American (New York, 1917), but is actually the 1902 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica A verbatim, albeit lagging, remake of. That was four or five years ago. Bioy Casares and I had dinner together, and we argued for a long time about the writing of a novel in which the novel is written in the first person, where the storyteller omits or confuses certain plot points, and where certain places cannot be written. To justify it, some readers—a very small number of readers—guessed something terrible or mundane. The mirror at the end of the corridor stared at us eagerly. We discovered (as is inevitable in the dead of night) that all mirrors are a little scary. At that time, Bioy Casares remembered that one of the founders of Uqbar said that mirrors and sexual intercourse were abominations because they multiplied the number of people. I asked him if there was any source for this famous saying, and he said that it could be found in the "Uqbal" article in the "British and American Encyclopedia." The furnished villa we rented happened to have the encyclopedia set. We find an entry for "Uppsala" at the end of Volume 46, and an entry for "Ural-Altaic Languages" in the first few pages of Volume 47, but no "Uqbar" at all. Bioy refused to give up and flipped through the catalog. He checked all the possible homophones: Uqbal, Uqbal, Oqbal, Oqbal...but there were no results everywhere. Before he left, he told me that it was a place name in Iraq or Asia Minor. I acknowledged it demurely. I guessed that Bioy was being cautious and just casually mentioned an unknown place name and the founder of a pagan religion, so he had to find a way to get off the stairs. Later, I checked Justus Perthes's "World Atlas", but still couldn't find it, which strengthened my guess.
The next day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aires and told me that he had found an entry about Uqbal in Volume 26 of the Anglo-American Encyclopedia. It did not contain the name of the founder of the pagan religion, but his teachings were mentioned in almost exactly the same language as Bioy had spoken last time, although perhaps not as elegantly. What he remembered was that mirrors and sexual intercourse were abominations. The text in the Encyclopedia goes like this: For the Gnostics, the physical universe was an illusion, and the latter (or rather) a specious reason. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominations because they multiply and diffuse the universe. I told him frankly that I wanted to see that entry. A few days later he brought it. To my surprise, however, Uqbar was not included at all in Ritter's exhaustive catalog of cartographic drawings.
The volume that Bioy brought is actually the twentieth volume of the "Anglo-American Encyclopedia"? Although it is what we are looking for, But the volume contains 921 pages, not the 917 indicated. The four extra pages happen to be the entry on Uqber, which, as the reader has already noticed, is not covered by the letters. We later compared it, and other than that, there was no other difference between the two volumes. In my mind, both volumes are marked as reprinted from the 10th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I bought Bioy's set of books when they were on sale.
We took a closer look at that entry. The only surprising thing is the passage Bioy remembered. The rest seems believable, but fits the general tone of the book and is a little dull (that's natural). As we read it again, we find some important ambiguities in its rigorous writing. Of the fourteen proper names in the geographical section, only three that we know of—Chorasan, Armenia, and Erzurum—are ambiguously included in the text. In the historical part, we know only one proper name; the deceitful wizard Esmedes, and this is mentioned as a metaphor. The entry seems to clearly define the location of Uqbar, but its vague reference points are the rivers, craters, and mountains of the same region. For example, the entry reads: To the south of Uqbar are the Chajatun Depression and the Al-Aqsa Delta. Wild horses breed on the islands in the delta. That's the beginning of page nine hundred and eighty. The history section (page 920) says that after the religious persecution in the 13th century, Orthodox Christians fled to the island to escape. There are still obelisks erected by them on the island, and their stone mirrors can be unearthed from time to time. The language and literature section is brief. There is only one thing that can leave an impression; Uqbal literature has the characteristics of fantasy. Its epics and legends never touch reality, but only talk about the two imaginary regions of Mulenas and Tlon... The four books mentioned in the bibliography we It has not yet been found, although the third volume—Silas Haslam: History of a Place Called Uqbar, 1874—can be found in the catalog of Bernard Quaritch's bookstore. ③The first book, "A Concise Introduction to the Uqbar Region of Asia Minor" published in 1641, was written by Johannes Valentinus Andreae. This incident is of great significance; two years later I accidentally discovered that name in De Quincey's works (Collected Works, Volume 13), and then I learned that the man was a German theologian who described the story in the early 17th century. The imaginary Red Rose Cross sect society - later generations actually established such a society according to his imagination.
That evening we went to the National Library and consulted many atlases, catalogs, annuals of geographical societies, and memoirs of travelers and historians, but in vain; no one had been to Uqbar. . The name does not appear in the general catalog of Bioy's encyclopedia. The next day Carlos Mastronardi (to whom I mentioned this) informed me that he had seen a book with a black gilt spine in a bookstore at the corner of Corrientes and Talcahuano. The "British and American Encyclopedia"... I rushed to the bookstore and found the twenty-sixth volume. Of course, there were no clues about Uqbal at all.
二
The illusory background of the lush honeysuckle and mirrors of the Adrog ④ Hotel still retains the limited and fading memory of Herbert Ashe, engineer of the Southern Railway. . In life Ashe was as ghostly as most Englishmen; in death he was more ghostly than ghostly. He was a tall, languid man with a tired, rectangular red beard. As far as I know, he was widowed and had no children. I go back to England every few years to see a solar corona and a few oak trees (I judged this based on the few photos he showed us). My father and he developed a close (an overstatement of the verb) English friendship, which began with mutual distrust and soon reached a level of tacit understanding without the need for verbal communication. They often gave each other books and newspapers; they played chess silently... I remember his appearance in the corridor of the hotel, holding a mathematics book in his hand, sometimes staring at the changing colors of the sky. One afternoon we were talking about what table of decimals to convert to sexagesimal (this is how sixty is written as ten). He also said that this work was commissioned from him by a Norwegian from Rio Grande do Sul. We had known each other for eight years and he never mentioned his time in Rio de Ronde do Sul... We talked about pastoral life, gunmen, the Brazilian roots of the word gaucho (some older Uruguayans still pronounce gaucho as gau). Joe), with all due respect we never talk about the functionality of hexadecimal anymore. In September 1937 (we were not in the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days ago, he received a registered mail from Brazil, which was a large octavo book. Ash left it at the bar and I found it a few months later. I flipped through it casually and felt a slight dizziness. I won’t go into details here, because what I’m talking about now is not my feelings, but the story of Uqbar, Tron and Orbis Tertius. It is said that on one of the Islamic nights of the Thousand Nights, the secret doors of Paradise opened and the water in the pitchers was sweeter than usual; if those doors had been open, I would not have felt what I felt that afternoon. The large octavo book is in English and has one thousand and one pages. Printed on the yellow spine and outer cover were these strange words: Tron's First Encyclopedia. Volume 11. Hlaer-Jangr, no date and place of publication. The first page and a sheet of paper covering the colored illustrations were stamped with an oval seal bearing the words Orbis Tertius. Two years ago I discovered a brief introduction to a false country in one of the volumes of a pirated encyclopedia; today I stumbled upon some rarer and more difficult material. What I now had in my grasp was a vast and methodical fragment of the entire history of a strange planet, with its architecture and card games, its formidable myths and tones of language, its kings and seas, its minerals and birds and fish, its algebra and fire, Theological and metaphysical controversies. It's all coherent and interconnected, with no obvious didactic intent or irony.
What I mean by "Volume 11" refers to the later and earlier volumes. Nestor Ibarra categorically denied the existence of those volumes in an article in the New Review of France; Esquière Martínez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle dismissed this suspicion, perhaps quite convincingly. The fact is that all investigations so far have turned up nothing. We searched the libraries of America and Europe in vain. Alfonso Reyes, tired of this detective work of little significance, suggested that we simply draw inferences and fill in the vast missing volumes. He half-jokingly and half-seriously calculated that a generation of Cologne scholars would probably have enough energy to devote their lives to it. This bold estimate brings us back to the main question: Who invented Tron? There must be more than one person, and everyone unanimously rules out the hypothesis that there is only one inventor - someone like Leibniz who worked tirelessly and unknownly in secret makes it impossible. It is speculated that this brave new world should be the collective creation of a secret society, a group of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, ethicists, led by an elusive genius. Scientists, painters, geometers, etc. There are many people who are proficient in those subjects, but not all of them can invent, let alone incorporate inventions into a strict systematic plan. That plan was so huge that the contribution of each author seemed minuscule in comparison. At first, I thought Tron was just chaos and an irresponsible fantasy; now I know that it is a universe, and there is a set of hidden laws that govern its operation, even if it is temporary. The apparent contradiction in Book 11 is the basis for the existence of the other books; the order of the book is clear and correct, which speaks volumes. The popular press, justifiably, made a big deal of Tl?n's animals and terrain; I thought its transparent tigers and blood towers might not deserve everyone's continued attention. I venture to spend a few minutes talking about Tron's cosmology.
Hume pointed out succinctly that Baker’s point of view cannot be refuted at all, but it is not convincing at all. This insight applies entirely to the completely false place of Tron. The peoples of that planet are idealists by nature. Their language and its derivatives - religion, literature, metaphysics - created the preconditions for idealism. In the view of the Tlon people, the world is not a collection of objects in space, but a series of miscellaneous and unrelated behaviors. It is continuous, short-lived, and takes up no space. Tron's "primitive language" (which gave rise to "modern" languages ??and dialects) had no nouns; it did have impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic adverbial suffixes or prefixes. For example: There is no equivalent word for "moon", but there is a verb equivalent for "moonrise". "The moon rises over the river" in Tron is hlorufangaxaxaxasmlo, which in turn means "the moonlight faces upwards and flows behind" (Sul Solal simplified it into "the moonlight flows upwards and flows behind").
What we talked about earlier was the languages ??of the Southern Hemisphere. As for the languages ??of the Northern Hemisphere (there is very little information about their original languages ??in Volume 11), the basic unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are made up of adjectives. It doesn't say "moon" there, just "the emptiness above the round darkness" or "the ethereal soft orange" or any other addition. The above example shows that the totality of the adjective refers only to a real object; the fact itself is purely accidental. The literature of the Northern Hemisphere (like Menon's living world) has a vast array of imaginative things, ready to be combined or broken down according to poetic needs. Sometimes it's all about simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of a visual nature and the other of an auditory nature; the color of the rising sun and the distant song of birds. There are many more examples: the sun and water on a swimmer's chest, the blurry, trembling pink you see when you close your eyes, the feeling of drifting down a river or floating in a dream. These second-level objects can be combined with other objects; through certain abbreviations, the combination process is endless. Some famous poems have only one huge word. The word constitutes a "poetic object" created by the author. When it is incredible, no one believes in the reality of nouns, so the number of poetic objects is infinite. The languages ??of Tl?n's northern hemisphere have all the terms of Indo-European languages ??and much more.
It is no exaggeration to say that Tron's classical culture consisted of only one discipline: psychology. All other subjects took a back seat. I said that the people on that planet believed that the universe was a series of thought processes that did not unfold in space but continued in time. Spinoza attributed the properties of extension and thought to the infinite divinity of psychology; the Tronians did not know how to compare the former, which is only a characteristic of certain states, with the latter, which is a true synonym for the universe. In other words, they do not understand that space can continue in time. Seeing smoke in the sky, then seeing a burning field, and then seeing a cigar that is not completely extinguished, are considered examples of association.
This kind of monism or complete idealism renders science useless. One thing can be explained (or judged) only by connecting it to another; Tlonians believe that connection is a subsequent state of the subject and cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. All mental states are immutable: even naming them—that is, classifying them—sends to distort them. From this it seems possible to conclude that Tron had no science or even reasoning. But the paradoxical truth is that there are almost countless reasonings. It's all the same nouns and situations in the Northern Hemisphere. All philosophy is in advance a dialectical game, a specious philosophy, which doubles the number of philosophies. Its systems are numerous, its structures are delightful, and its types are astounding. The metaphysicians of Tron were not looking for authenticity or even verisimilitude; they were looking for wonder. They considered metaphysics to be a branch of fantasy literature. They know that the so-called system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one aspect. The expression "in all aspects" is rejected because it implies the addition of present and past moments, and addition is impossible. The plural "past" was also criticized because it meant another impossible operation... One of Tron's schools even denied time, reasoning like this: the present cannot be determined; the future is not real, only present. Hope; the past is not real, it is just a current memory. ⑥ Another school of thought claims that all time has passed and that our lives are merely memories or reflections of an irreversible process of decline, undoubtedly distorted and destroyed. Still others claim that the history of the universe—and our lives and the minutiae of our lives—was written by a lesser god in order to court the devil. Another school of thought believes that the universe can be compared to a code written in which not all symbols have meaning, only what happens every three hundred nights. One school of thought claims that while we sleep here, we are awake in another place, and therefore each person is two.
Among Tron's many theories, only materialism caused an uproar. Like those who posited the paradox, materialism was proposed by certain thinkers who were overly enthusiastic and underanalysed. In order to make it easier for people to understand the incomprehensible argument, a pagan preacher in the 11th century came up with the specious theory of nine copper coins, which caused a sensation in Tlon.
There are many versions of that "deceptive reasoning", and the number of copper coins and the number found vary; the following version is the most widely circulated:
On Tuesday, a certain person A was walking on a lonely road and lost nine coins. A copper coin. On Thursday, Person B picked up four coins on the road. Due to the rain on Wednesday, the coins had some patina. On Friday, person C found three copper coins on the road. On Friday morning, A found two in the hallway of his home. The founder of the pagan religion wanted to deduce from this incident the true circumstances of the lost and recovered nine coins—that is, its continuity. He asserts that it is absurd to suppose that four copper coins did not exist between Tuesday and Thursday, three copper coins did not exist between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, and two copper coins did not exist between Tuesday and Friday morning. The logical thought is that the coin was always present during all three of those moments, just in some hidden way that was not known to the public.
In Tron's language it is impossible to propose this paradox; it is simply incomprehensible. Defenders of common sense initially limited themselves to denying the veracity of the story. Repeatedly saying that is nonsense, boldly citing two new words that are neither conventional nor consistent with rigorous thinking. The two verbs "find" and "lost" contain logical errors, and use unproven judgments as proof of propositions. arguments, because they assume the identity of the first nine and the last nine coins. They point out that all nouns (people, money, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) have only a metaphorical meaning. They pointed out that the sentence "The coins had developed some patina due to rain on Wednesday" had an ulterior motive and was premised on the argument they were trying to prove: namely, the continued existence of the four coins between Thursday and Tuesday. They explained that "equality" and "identity" were two different things, thus falling into the realm of "abnormality," a hypothetical situation in which nine people experienced severe pain for nine consecutive nights. Wouldn’t it be absurd to imagine the same pain? they asked. ⑧They say that the blasphemous motive of the pagan founder was to give the divine attribute of "being" to a few ordinary coins, sometimes denying plurality, sometimes not denying it. They reasoned: If equality includes identity, they have to admit that nine coins are just one.
Incredibly, the debate is not over. A hundred years after the question was posed, an orthodox thinker no less inferior to the pagan founder came up with a very bold hypothesis. He speculated that there is only one subject, and that indivisible subject is everyone in the universe, and these people are the organs and masks of God. A is B and C. The reason why C found three coins was because he remembered that A had lost the coins; the reason why A found two coins in the corridor was because he remembered that the rest of the coins had been found... Volume 11 explains the factors that determine the complete victory of idealism and pantheism. There are three main reasons: first, to abandon solipsism; second, to preserve the possibility of scientific foundation; third, to preserve the possibility of Shinto worship. Schopenhauer (the passionate yet sober Schopenhauer) proposed a very similar theory in the first volume of his Appendices and Supplements.
Tron's geometry encompasses two slightly different disciplines: visual geometry and tactile geometry. The latter corresponds to our geometry and is subordinate to the former. The basis of visual geometry is faces, not points. This geometry did not recognize parallel lines and claimed that man changed the shape of things around him as he moved his position. The basic concept of Tron's arithmetic is indefinite numbers. They emphasized the importance of the concept of size represented in our mathematics by the > and < symbols. They asserted that arithmetic processes can change the nature of quantities, making them from indefinite to definite. The fact that several people arrive at equal results when calculating the same quantity is considered by psychology to be an example of good use of memory. We know that the Tron people advocate that the subject of knowledge is single and eternal.
In terms of literary practice, the concept of a single subject is also omnipotent. Books are rarely signed by their authors. The concept of plagiarism simply does not exist: the established belief is that all works are the work of an eternal, unknown author. Reviews tend to make up authors: pick two different works—say, the Tao Te Ching and One Thousand and One Nights—attribute them to the same author, and then honestly identify the interesting "literary man" ” mentality...
Tron’s books are also different. Fictional works have only one plot, which can lead to various possible imaginable changes. Works of a philosophical nature invariably contain propositions and counter-propositions, strict arguments for and against a theory. A book that does not contain its opposites is considered incomplete.
Idealism, which has existed for hundreds of years, continues to influence today. In the oldest regions of Tlon, it is not uncommon to replicate annihilated objects. The two searched for a pen; the former found it but remained silent; the latter found a second pen, no less real than the first, but more in line with his expectations. Those second-level objects are called "heroniers" and are longer than the first-level objects, although their shape is not as good-looking. Not so long ago, those "heroniers" were the accidental products of carelessness and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production has a history of only a hundred years, but that's what Volume 11 says. Initial attempts were fruitless. Yet its approach is worth remembering. The warden of a state prison informed the inmates that there were tombs beneath an ancient river bed, and whoever dug up something valuable could be freed. A few months before the excavation began, the prisoners were shown photos of what they might find.
The first test proved that hope and greed have a restraining effect; the prisoners worked for a week with shovels and pickaxes, and unearthed no "heron" except a rusty wheel, which was still period after the test. The prison experiment was kept secret and was later repeated in four schools. Three schools could be said to be complete failures; students at the fourth school (the principal died unexpectedly when starting the excavation) unearthed - or produced - a gold mask, an ancient sword, two or three clay pots and a The king's green and incomplete torso has writing on the chest, but the meaning of the writing has not yet been deciphered. Through these experiments it was found that it was inappropriate to involve persons who understood the experimental nature of the excavations... The objects obtained from large-scale investigations were contradictory; nowadays more solitary and almost ad hoc methods are adopted. The methodical production of "heronir" (so they call it in Volume 11) has greatly helped archaeologists, making it possible to question and even modify the past, making it as malleable as the future. . The strange thing is that the second and third levels of "Hronnir" - that is, another "Hronnir" derived from "Hronn", or "Hronnir" derived from "Hronn" "Hronir" - The distortion of the first level is exaggerated; the fifth level has almost no change; the ninth level is easily confused with the second level; the purity of the eleventh level is even higher than the first level. The evolution process is cyclical; the twelfth-level "Herron" begins to degenerate. Sometimes, the "Ur" is more peculiar and more authentic than all "Herron", that is, the product of suggestion, the object derived from expectation. The big golden mask I mentioned is an excellent example.
Things in Tron are constantly copied; when the details of things are forgotten, they are easily blurred and lost. The example of the threshold is very typical: when the beggar often goes there, the threshold always exists, but after the beggar dies, the threshold disappears. Sometimes a few birds or a horse can save the ruins of an amphitheatre.
1940, Salto East
Notes:
①Gaona Street and Ramos Mejia Street, both in Buenos Aires Ellis street name.
② Bioy Casares (1914-1999), a contemporary Argentine writer and a close friend of Borges.
③Haslam also published "A General History of the Labyrinth". ——Original note
④Adrog, a town in Admiral Brown County, southern suburbs of Buenos Aires
⑤Leibniz (1646-1716), German mathematician and philosopher. He discovered the principle of calculus at the same time as Newton; he believed that all living things are composed of "monads", in which there is a pre-established harmony, and the center of the harmony is God who created the world.
⑥Russell ("Rational Analysis", 1921, page 159) imagined that the planet was formed a few minutes ago, and that the inhabitants of the planet can "recall" the illusory past - original note
⑦According to the twelve base system, the century here is one hundred and forty-four years. ——Original note
⑧To this day, a church in Tron still believes that pain, yellow-green color, temperature, and sound are the only reality from a purely theoretical perspective. All are the same person in the moment of ecstasy. All men who repeat Shakespeare's verses are William Shakespeare.
——Original note
Is this it?