Plot: 4/9. I would give a higher score if Borges could add more suspenses and twists to the plot so that I could not be so easily distracted during reading.
In summary, the narrator heard about an epigram from his friend, but they couldn’t find more information about its speaker and his background except some fragments in encyclopedias.
It wasn’t until he tended the remains of his dead friend, Herbert Ashe, that he got the chance of reading a monograph introducing Orbis Tertius.
It turned out that Ashe and his mates intentionally fabricated the illusory world which in the end intruded the reality, affected the culture and even obliterated the history bizarrely.
Core: 6/9. It’s at least better than Alfred Jarry’s Elements of Pataphysics under the same subject of metaphysics.
Character: 5/9. Borges flavored his fiction with many real celebrities or credible facts. And indeed I’m impressed by these persistent adherents who worked clandestinely for a purely fictional world.
World and Others: 6/9. Borges’ envisioned world alluded to many metaphysical matters in reality and could be even seemed as the opposite of the reality where thoughts were able to effect the world more easily.
- The world was mental, successive and temporal yet not spatial. Space was not conceived as having duration in time.
- There existed only a series of acts rather than objects.
- People there conceived the universe as a series of mental processes.
- Metaphysicians there sought fantasy rather than plausibility.
- One school even argued that the present was undefined and indefinite: The future had no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as president recollection.
- One school thought themselves as crepuscular memory.
- Nothing caused more uproar than the school of materialism with its paradox of nine copper coins, as the critics claimed equality was not equivalent to the identity.
- Eventually a thinker made a daring conjecture that there was but a single subject and this idealistic pantheism triumphed over all other schools.
- The acting of counting could modify the amount counted and turn the indefinite into the definite.
- The concept of plagiarism did not exist.
- A book without counter book was considered incomplete.
- They could replicate the lost objects by simple thoughts if the participants were unconscious and few. In this way, the past was no less malleable than the future.
- Things would be obscured in detail when they were forgotten by living creature.