"Things duplicate themselves in Tlön. They tend at the same time to efface themselves, to lose their detail when people forget them. The classic example is that of a stone threshhold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from sight on his death. Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater."
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius," in Fictions
Posts
2 comments:
...but if at least one other person knew the beggar visited the site, wouldn't that also preserve the place? Also, someone had to notice the absence of the stone threshold and was therefore in some way aware of its presence.
How direct of an observer must one be to preserve the identity of something else? And then any muddled thoughts and impressions could change the object into something slightly different from its original identity.
but monuments have no self-identity, unless they are ladybugs, in which case they self-identify as not ladies.
so the monument's identity is its perceived identity at any level of observation, which might explain why people build monuments to themselves in death; a second order approximation for self-identity.
Post a Comment