Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"From my weakness I drew strength that never left me."

"In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity. . . ."

"Our historians, the most discerning in the world, have invented a method for correcting chance. It is well known that the operations of this method are (in general) trustworthy; although, naturally, they are not divulged without a measure of deceit."

"The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire."

"In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke."

"He commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted edifice."

"He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe."

"The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming."

"“To think, analyze and invent,” he also wrote me,“are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence.To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others,to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universalis thought,is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”"

"There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless."

"Like any man of good taste, Menard detested these useless carnivals, only suitable— he used to say— for evoking plebeian delight in anachronism, or (what is worse) charming us with the primary idea that all epochs are the same, or that they are different."

"All men, in the climatic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

"Even now it is uncertain whether this discovery was accidental, or whether the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius condoned it."

"It is enough to recall or to mention subsequent events, in as few words as possible, that concave basin which is the collective memory will furnish the wherewithal to enrich or amplify them."

"Buckley did not believe in God, but nevertheless wished to demonstrate to the nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world."

"It has allowed them to question and even to modify the past, which nowadays is no less malleable or obedient than the future."

"It states that the operation of counting modifies quantities and changes them from indefinites into definites."

"The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement."

"Each state of mind is irreducible. The mere act of giving it a name, that is of classifying it, implies a falsification of it. From all this, it would be possible to deduce that there is no science in Tlön, let alone rational thought. The paradox, however, is that sciences exist, in countless number."

"This monism, or extreme idealism, completely invalidates science. To explain or to judge an event is to identify or unite it with another one. In Tlön, such connection is a later stage in the mind of the observer, which can in no way affect or illuminate the earlier stage."

"“Copulation and mirrors are abominable.” The text of the encyclopedia read: “For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.”"

"Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man."

"*The great South American literary journal edited in Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo.— Editor's note."

"More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books."

"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary."

"a man must pick up a knife (is he dreaming?) and go out into the brainless night to face bestiality. Why? He does not know. All our knowledge has led us exactly to this point, just where we started, endless ages ago. We have only been playing a game, an immortal game, all along."

"Men long for their deceits. A few will blindly fight back."

"This notion burgeons in Borges to the point where he can adduce that at the moment of coitus every man is one man. And that when a man recites William Shakespeare, he is William Shakespeare. (Perhaps, after all, every man is one man, every book one book; though Borges insists that every book is also a specific and particular dialogue.)"

"Among his themes are a mythology of dagger thrusts; the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss; the labyrinths which are books; cogito, ergo sum cogitatio; the genealogy of insomnia; the iconography of the eternal return."

"He is an imagist of cultural fugues and choreographies, of the faltering, lamentable Dance of Life. One cinquepace is not the same as another, but there is no need to dance until one drops in the marathon. In literature it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!"