On Exactitude
in Science
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine short story writer, poet, essayist and translator - had a strong influence on the direction of literary fiction through his genre-blending metafictions and writings. Find bellow one of his small, but flavourful, shorts (left) and a personal answer of mine as a continuation to his text (right).
On Exactitude
in Science
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions,
translated by Andrew Hurley
...In that Empire of the Dark, where light twists slowly the bones of anarchy and rumours of Infinity, the Discipline of Geography refills. In that Empire of the Dark, the Art of Cartography, powders its territories and quasi-formations, insistently hunting the depths that subtract them.
Recalled in duty and awe, the Cartographers Guild strike back to map, with flickering hope, the marvelling summits and tumbling valleys, the mighty traverses and curling plateaus pulled by mysterious vacuums of impossible reach. Wrapped in an aura of ash and debris, still today, out of the Tattered Ruins of Planet Earth, dirty miners insist to seek fortune, humming in silence and groovin' sync, out for the goods, in that Empire of the Dark.
The following Generations
by Olivia Ale