"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges

In this story truly unlike any other, Borges plays with years of philosophical and scientific argument to explore the limits of knowledge, the gaps in our understanding. From the 1962 volume "Labyrinths", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius" is itself a labyrinth, a maze that may entrap one forever in its twists and turns. Here are 30 words to help you start the journey.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. fallacious
    based on an incorrect or misleading notion or information
    The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902.
  2. polemic
    a verbal or written attack, especially of a belief or dogma
    Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality.
  3. disseminate
    cause to become widely known
    Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.
  4. nebulous
    lacking definite form or limits
    The note seemed to fix the boundaries of Uqbar, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and mountain ranges of that same region.
  5. obelisk
    a stone pillar tapering towards a pyramidal top
    In the historical section (page 920) we learned that as a result of the religious persecutions of the thirteenth century, the orthodox believers sought refuge on these islands, where to this day their obelisks remain and where it is not uncommon to unearth their stone mirrors.
  6. listless
    lacking zest or vivacity
    He was tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red.
  7. taciturn
    habitually reserved and uncommunicative
    They used to carry out an exchange of books and newspapers and engage in taciturn chess games...
  8. infinitesimal
    immeasurably small
    This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal.
  9. dictum
    an authoritative declaration
    This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön.
  10. congenital
    present at birth but not necessarily hereditary
    The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist.
  11. metaphysics
    the philosophical study of being and knowing
    They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
  12. tremulous
    quivering as from weakness or fear
    There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep.
  13. ascribe
    attribute or credit to
    Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second - which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos.
  14. verisimilitude
    the appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true
    The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.
  15. crepuscular
    like or relating to twilight; dim
    Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
  16. tenuous
    lacking substance or significance
    Another, that the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon.
  17. renown
    the state or quality of being widely honored and acclaimed
    In order to facilitate the comprehension of this inconceivable thesis, a heresiarch of the eleventh century (3) devised the sophism of the nine copper coins, whose scandalous renown is in Tlön equivalent to that of the Eleatic paradoxes.
    "heresiarch" comes from "heresy"-any opinions or doctrines at variance with the official or orthodox position. So a heresiarch is someone whose unorthodox positions are the basis for a system of thought, analogous to a patriarch and his line of descendents.

    The Eleatic Paradoxes refer to Zeno's Paradoxes ( Zeno was from Elea) of motion which concluded, among other things, that because you always had to go halfway, and then a quarter of the way and then an eighth of the way and so on to reach y
  18. specious
    plausible but false
    There are many versions of this "specious reasoning," which vary the number of coins and the number of discoveries; the following is
    the most common:
  19. neologism
    a newly invented word or phrase
    They repeated that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the rash application of two neologisms not authorized by usage and alien to all rigorous thought: the verbs "find" and "lose," which beg the question, because they presuppose the identity of the first and of the last nine coins.
  20. solipsism
    the philosophical theory that the self is all that exists
    The first, its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possibility of preserving the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of preserving the cult of the gods.
  21. scrupulously
    with careful attention and effort to do something correctly
    The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...
  22. modus operandi
    an unvarying or habitual method or procedure
    However, the modus operandi merits description.
  23. hermetic
    completely sealed or airtight
    Its vague initial program included "hermetic studies," philanthropy and the cabala.
  24. conclave
    a confidential or secret meeting
    After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country.
  25. ascetic
    someone who practices self denial as a spiritual discipline
    ... one of its affiliates conferred with the ascetic millionaire
  26. nihilism
    complete denial of established authority and institutions
    To this gigantic idea he added another, a product of his nihilism (4): that of keeping the enormous enterprise a secret.
  27. premonitory
    warning of future misfortune
    I recall one of the first of these with particular clarity and it seems that I perceived then something of its premonitory character.
  28. inextricable
    incapable of being disentangled or untied
    We went to bed, but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunken ravings of an unseen neighbor, who intermingled inextricable insults with snatches of milongas - or rather with snatches of the same milonga.
  29. attenuated
    reduced in strength
    Volume (for example, the multiplication of the hronir) have been eliminated or attenuated in the Memphis copies; it is reasonable to
    imagine that these omissions follow the plan of exhibiting a world which is not too incompatible with the real world.
  30. vertiginous
    having or causing a whirling sensation; liable to falling
    All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man.
Created on Fri Nov 08 22:38:38 EST 2013 (updated Tue Apr 09 14:42:24 EDT 2019)

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