Editing Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (section)

==Summary==
The reportage unfolds as a first-person narrative and contains many references (see [[#Fact and fiction|below]]) to real people, locations, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones. It is divided into two parts and a [[postscript]]. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them or their relevance. The timing of events in Borges's story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in the postscript, set in 1947.

===Part one===
Borges and his friend and collaborator, [[Adolfo Bioy Casares]], are developing their next book in a country house near [[Buenos Aires]], in 1940. In an observation, Bioy quotes that "mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men" from a [[heresiarch]] of a land named '''Uqbar'''. Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy replies that he read it in the chapter about Uqbar of the ''Anglo-American Cyclopaedia'', "a literal if inadequate reprint" of the 1902 edition of ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]''. They check the book and are unable to find the said chapter, to Bioy's surprise.<ref>"Tlön...", p. 112</ref> The two then search for the name 'Uqbar' in numerous atlases and other encyclopedias, trying different alternative spellings, to no avail.

The following day, Bioy tells Borges he has found the chapter they were looking for in a different reprint of the same encyclopedia. The chapter, although brief and full of names unfamiliar to Borges and Bioy, entices their curiosity. It describes Uqbar as an obscure region, located in Iraq or [[Asia Minor]], with an all-fantastic literature taking place in the mythical worlds of Mlejnas and '''Tlön'''.<ref>"Tlön...", p. 113</ref> Afterwards, they keep searching for Uqbar in other sources, but are unable to find any mention.

===Part two===
The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in [[duodecimal]] systems, dies of an [[aneurysm]] rupture. Borges inherits a packet containing a book, which was left by Ashe in a pub. That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set. The book contains two oval blue stamps with the words '''''Orbis Tertius''''' inscribed in blue. From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.

The people of the imaginary Tlön hold an extreme form of [[George Berkeley|Berkeley]]'s [[subjective idealism]], denying the reality of the material world. Their world is understood "not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts."<ref name="tlon115">"Tlön…", p. 115</ref> One of the imagined language families of Tlön lacks nouns, being centered instead in impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic adverbial affixes. Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": ''hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö'', meaning literally "upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned." ([[Andrew Hurley (academic)|Andrew Hurley]], one of Borges' translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".<ref>{{cite web | author-last = Hurley | author-first = Andrew | url = http://shipwrecklibrary.com/borges/hurley-zahir/ | title = The Zahir and I | website = The Garden of Forking Paths | access-date = August 3, 2006 }}</ref>) In another language family of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic [[adjective]]", which in combinations of two or more forms nouns: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky".<ref name="tlon115"/>

A dissident scholar of Tlön, going against the established philosophy and languages, tried to propound the theory of [[materialism]], suggesting that a number of coins still existed after a man lost them and they could not be seen by anyone, "albeit in some secret way that we are forbidden to understand". The proposition was scandalous and widely rejected by Tlön's academia, who considered it a [[sophism]] and a [[fallacy]]. A century later, another thinker formulated a [[pantheism|pantheistic]] conjecture that "there is but a single subject; that indivisible subject is every being in the universe, and the beings of the universe are the organs and masks of the deity"; this ended up triumphing over all other schools of thought. One of the effects is the rejection of [[authorship]], with books seldom being signed and the concept of [[plagiarism]] being alien because "all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous".

Another influence of that idealism is that, for about a hundred years, a class of duplicating, apparently atemporal objects called ''hrönir'' (singular ''hrön'') have been produced in Tlön. Objects also "grow vague or sketchy and lose detail" when they begin to be forgotten, culminating in their disappearance when they are completely forgotten.

===Postscript===
In the [[anachronism|anachronistic]] postscript set in 1947, Borges remembers events that occurred in the last years.

In 1941, the world and the narrator have learned, through the emergence of a letter, about the true nature of Tlön. It goes that a "benevolent secret society" was formed "one night in [[Lucerne]] or in London", in the 17th century, and had Berkeley among its members. That group, a society of intellectuals named ''Orbis Tertius'', studied "[[Hermeticism|hermetic studies]], [[philanthropy]] and the [[Kabbalah]]" (an allusion to societies such as the [[Bavarian Illuminati]], the [[Freemasonry|Freemasons]] and the [[Rosicrucianism|Rosicrucians]]), but its main purpose was to create a country: Uqbar. It gradually became clear that such work would have to be carried by numerous generations, so each master agreed to elect a disciple who would carry on his work to perpetuate an hereditary arrangement. The society is eventually [[persecution|persecuted]], but reemerges in the United States two centuries thereafter. The American "eccentric" millionaire Ezra Buckley, one of the members of the restored sect, finds its undertaking too modest, proposing that their creation be of an entire world instead of just a country. He also adds that an entire encyclopedia about this world—named Tlön—must be written and that the whole scheme "have no pact with that impostor Jesus Christ."<ref>"Tlön…", p. 120</ref> The new ''Orbis Tertius'', composed of three hundred collaborators, proceeds to conclude the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. An explanation of Uqbar is not explicitly given in the story.

By 1942, Tlönian objects began to inexplicably appear in the real world. One of the first instances in which this occurs is when Princess Faucigny Lucinge received, via mail, a vibrating compass with a Tlönian scripture. Another instance is witnessed by Borges himself: a drunk man, shortly after dying, dropped coins among which a small but extremely heavy shining metal cone appeared. It is suggested that these occurrences may have been forgeries, but yet products of a secret science and technology.

By 1944, all forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön have been discovered and published in a library in [[Memphis, Tennessee]]. The material becomes accessible worldwide and immensely influential on Earth's culture, science and languages. By the time Borges concludes the story, presumably in 1947, the world is gradually becoming Tlön. Borges then turns to an obsession of his own: a translation of Sir [[Thomas Browne]]'s ''[[Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial|Urn Burial]]'' into Spanish.