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.There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination—fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan.The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.At first it was thought that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so.Let it suffice to remind the reader that the apparent contradictions of Volume Eleven are the foundation stone of the proof that the other volumes do in fact exist: the order that has been observed in it is just that lucid, just that fitting.Popular magazines have trumpeted, with pardonable excess, the zoology and topography of Tlön.In my view, its transparent tigers and towers of blood do not perhaps merit the constant attention of all mankind, but I might be so bold as to beg a few moments to outline its conception of the universe.Hume declared for all time that while Berkeley's arguments admit not the slightest refutation, they inspire not the slightest conviction.That pronouncement is entirely true with respect to the earth, entirely false with respect to Tlön.The nations of that planet are, congenitally, idealistic.Their language and those things derived from their language—religion, literature, metaphysics—presuppose idealism.For the people of Tlön, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts —the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial.There are no nouns in the conjectural Ursprache of Tlön, from which its "present-day" languages and dialects derive: there are impersonal verbs, modified by mono-syllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs.For example, there is no noun that corresponds to our word "moon," but there is a verb which in English would be "to moonate" or "to enmoon." "The moon rose above the river" is "hlör ufang axaxaxas mlö," or, as Xul Solar* succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.That principle applies to the languages of the southern hemisphere.In the northern hemisphere (about whose Ursprache Volume Eleven contains very little information), the primary unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective.Nouns are formed by stringing together adjectives.One does not say "moon"; one says "aerial-bright above dark-round" or "soft-amberish-celestial" or any other string.In this case, the complex of adjectives corresponds to a real object, but that is purely fortuitous.The literature of the northern hemisphere (as in Meinong's subsisting world) is filled with ideal objects, called forth and dissolved in an instant, as the poetry requires.Sometimes mere simultaneity creates them.There are things composed of two terms, one visual and the other auditory: the color of the rising sun and the distant caw of a bird.There are things composed of many: the sun and water against the swimmer's breast, the vague shimmering pink one sees when one's eyes are closed, the sensation of being swept along by a river and also by Morpheus.These objects of the second degree may be combined with others; the process, using certain abbreviations, is virtually infinite.There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word; this word is a "poetic object" created by the poet.The fact that no one believes in the reality expressed by these nouns means, paradoxically, that there is no limit to their number.The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere possess all the nouns of the Indo-European languages—and many, many more.It is no exaggeration to say that the classical culture of Tlön is composed of a single discipline—psychology—to which all others are subordinate.I have said that the people of that planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes that occur not in space but rather successively, in time.Spinoza endows his inexhaustible deity with the attributes of spatial extension and of 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 for the cosmos [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]