## Page 17: Initial Discovery of Uqbar
**Key Passage:**
"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia... From the far end of the corridor, the mirror was watching us; and we discovered, with the inevitability of discoveries made late at night, that mirrors have something grotesque about them."
**Margin Note:** "Self referential to this story"
* Comment:** "Referring to the narrator passage"
**Discussion:**
* The passage demonstrates self-referential meta-fiction where Borges creates a narrative structure inserting himself and his real-life friend Bioy Casares as characters
* The story discusses creating fictional narratives and unreliable encyclopedias, while being precisely that kind of fiction
* The narrator describes Casares talking about "a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened" - which is essentially what Borges is doing in this very story
* "The self-referential nature of that narrator passage is fascinating. The way Borges writes about a narrator who 'omitted or corrupted what happened' is cleverly mirroring the very story structure you're reading."
## Page 23: Language and Ontology of Tlön
**Key Passage:**
"The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Their language, with its derivatives—fiction, literature, and metaphysics—presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts."
**Margin Note:** "collective imagination Then Teaching linguistics difference in thinking"
**Discussion:**
* In Tlön there are no nouns in their hypothetical Ursprache language
* They use impersonal verbs with modifiers instead
* Nouns are formed by accumulating adjectives
* This linguistic framework fundamentally changes how reality is perceived - instead of discrete objects with properties, the Tlönians see collections of properties that temporarily coalesce
* Reflection:** "Useful that I know mandarin, Fujianese, German, English. lol. Like ohhhh Borges is trying to give the audience what it means to live in multilingual lives"
**on Linguistic Perspectives:**
* Multilingual experience provides unique insight into how language shapes thinking
* Borges is exploring what it means to inhabit multiple linguistic realities simultaneously
* The mental flexibility developed by switching between different language systems makes Borges' linguistic thought experiment more immediately graspable
* Connection to Plato's conception of truth and defining abstract concepts: "Nounes are acrrued by a collection of adjectives. This reminds me of how the definitions of truth in Plato is the light that comes out of the sun. Since the Good, is so abstract, but to truly describe it it's through the stuff comes out the Good."
## Page 28: Geometry and Literary Theory in Tlön
**Key Passage:**
"The geometry of Tlön has two somewhat distinct systems, a visual one and a tactile one. The latter system corresponds to our geometry; they consider it inferior to the former. The foundation of visual geometry is the surface, not the point."
**Margin Notes:** "Kitchen!" and "Borges!"
**Key Passage:**
"In literary matters too, the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author. Books are rarely signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been established that all books are the work of one single writer, who is timeless and anonymous."
**Margin Note:** "hp lovecraft [Borges]"
**Discussion:**
* The concept of a single anonymous author challenges Western notions of originality and authorship
* Tlön's geometry prioritizes surfaces over points, rejecting the principle of parallelism
* These concepts represent fundamental challenges to Western epistemology
* The rejection of individual authorship anticipates poststructuralist theories of the "death of the author"
* "And ultimately it makes sense, he is describing a world that doesn't exist, while we are imagining him creating this world that he is talking about, in talking about difference rather than sameness. We can imagine his world, but talking about what the world isn't. Thus creating his world."
## Page 29: Hrönir and Reality Creation
**Key Passage:**
"Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the very oldest regions of Tlön, it is not an uncommon occurrence for lost objects to be duplicated. Two people are looking for a pencil; the first one finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but more in keeping with his expectation. These secondary objects are called hrönir."
**Margin Note:** "Reality ephemeral"
**Discussion:**
* Objects in Tlön are created by expectation rather than discovered
* Secondary objects (hrönir) are "more in keeping with expectation" than originals
* This concept anticipates Baudrillard's theory of simulacra - copies without originals
* The modus operandi of creating hrönir through expectation demonstrates how conceptual frameworks reshape perception
* "A lot of really good parts, one thing that stood out was the talk about how important symbolism is in a world of rationality, an antithesis to German enlightenment/optimization/rationalization/nazism. How when talking about and looking into Tlön, the world becomes more 'magical' where Tlönian influence seems to impact the world once we kept reading and looking for it."
## Page 30: The Development of Hrönir
**Key Passage:**
"The hrönir of the second and third degree—that is, the hrönir derived from another hrön, and the hrönir derived from the hrön of a hrön—exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the originals do not possess."
**Margin Note:** "Simulacrum"
**Discussion:**
* The concept represents a "fractal epistemology" where knowledge reproduces itself at different scales
* The ur - "objects brought into being by hope" - connects to libidinal economics where desire itself is productive and generative
* This system of copies deriving from copies that eventually surpass their originals perfectly anticipates Baudrillard's simulacra theory
* The archaeological experiment where expectations create artifacts demonstrates how desire reshapes reality
* "What you said - 'The ur - objects produced purely by suggestion or hope' - This is libidinal economic"
## Page 31: Secret Society and the Creation of Tlön
**Key Passage:**
"The elaborate story began one night in Lucerne or London, in the early seventeenth century. A benevolent secret society (which counted Dalgarno and, later, George Berkeley among its members) came together to invent a country. [...] About 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the members had a conversation with the millionaire ascetic, Ezra Buckley. Buckley listened with some disdain as the other man talked, and then burst out laughing at the modesty of the project. He declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet."
**Margin Note:** "lol"
**Key Passage:**
"Buckley did not believe in God, but nevertheless wished to demonstrate to the nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world."
**Discussion:**
* The revelation of the secret society creating Tlön adds another layer of meta-fiction
* Buckley's nihilistic motivation creates an ironic challenge to both faith and rationalism
* The society's project gradually infiltrates reality, demonstrating how conceptual frameworks reshape perception
* The historical figures mentioned (Berkeley, Dalgarno) connect the fictional world to real philosophical traditions
* This is similar to how mystical esotericism, animasm, and religious orders have this power of turning the mundane into the symbolic. And thus, actualizing the fantastical epistemologies and ontologies into the world.
## Thematic Analysis
**1. Language and Reality Construction**
* Borges explores how language doesn't just describe reality but shapes our perception of it
* The Tlönian language with no nouns demonstrates how linguistic structures determine what can be conceived
* This anticipates later linguistic relativism and Sapir-Whorf hypotheses
* Reader's multilingual background provides unique insight into how different languages structure reality differently
**2. Meta-Fiction and Self-Reference**
* The story constantly blurs the line between fiction and reality
* Borges includes himself and real-life friends as characters
* The fictional world of Tlön gradually infiltrates the "real" world of the narrator
* This creates a recursive pattern where fiction creates reality that creates fiction
**3. Philosophical Anticipation**
* The story anticipates multiple philosophical movements by decades:
* Poststructuralism and the death of the author
* Baudrillard's simulacra theory
* Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thinking
* Libidinal economics where desire creates reality
**4. Identity and Unity**
* Multiple frameworks collapse individual identity:
* "All books are the work of one single writer"
* "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare"
* "There is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe"
* This connects to modern concepts like social graphs where identity emerges from relationships rather than intrinsic qualities
**5. Symbolism vs. Rationalism**
* Borges presents a counterpoint to German Enlightenment rationalism
* The symbolic/mystical worldview has transformative power over perception
* The story itself performs what it describes - creating a framework that changes how we see the world
* This parallels religious and mystical thinking where belief shapes reality
** Cross-Disciplinary Connections:**
* Database structures and Facebook's social graph
* Foucault's conception of personhood through relationships rather than essential identity
* Deleuze's rhizomatic thinking
* Baudrillard's simulacra and simulation
* Poststructuralist philosophy anticipation
* Linguistic relativity through multilingual experience